Anna Lena Phillips Bell
3 poems
Pears
Where cloven tracks dent the deep black sandy soil,
turned faintly pink in early evening light,
I duck beneath the low brows of the trees
and turn the windfalls over in my hands.
Pale, articulate wounds break the rough brown coats.
Even the whole ones are sticky, as if from spit;
on the air, the scent of just-fermenting fruit
and just-gone deer. Just east, across the lake,
a mile past swamp and dunes, the ocean rolls.
Last year a hurricane flooded the orchard. Months on,
blue crabs walked the less and less brackish lakebed
as the water lilies returned, and the water weed.
The crabs could not last; the orchard grass is back
in soil washed through with salt. A fat green pear
has fallen to the crook of one tree’s branches.
I lift it out and balance it on the others,
whole and near-whole, cradled in my shirt.
Cutting them open in the evening kitchen,
we meet the center deer and humans crave—
the sweetest water I know, squeezed from between
hard stony cells that greet the tongue like grains
of salt, that tempering texture—the very thing
you’d think would come from flowers, in May, across
the lake and swamp, over dunes, through myrtle and pine,
conversing with the ocean—nectar and stone,
the fresh and salt, in each fine pear, made one.
Dishwashing
Dregs of red wine are left in my grandmother Swannie’s
crystal glasses that surely were made for some finer
vintage, tiny flowers encircling their lips,
stained and serene next to coffee cups, stacked plates.
Now I run warm water into one glass and
poke at the stubborn wine in its curving bowl.
Pushing the loosening edges of crimson feels like
putting my finger in somebody’s belly button,
an innie, looking for lint, a lode of it, barely
visible, dark in the dark, satisfaction of scraping
something from something. But belly button’s too close to
sin, she’d have said, too private, almost cussing,
all those covered-up parts had better stay covered
outside the narrow occasions on which being naked’s
sanctioned. If the glass has a navel, though, it
can’t be somebody else’s: squirming, they’d say she was
right, my grandmother, that’s what makes someone’s privates
private. Even a dishwasher’s clinical touch,
up to the elbows in soapsuds, would set them off, and
since it’s been proved you cannot tickle your ownself,
this must be mine: I must have been wearing red,
lots of it, velvety, wine-dark red that rolls itself
into the body’s crevices, makes itself comfy—
or else I am reopening, not aberrance
but reminder: this is the bowl you collect in,
portal to inside, archaic, these are the vital
dregs that turn you into yourself. You know
all of the curses. Speaking their names, collect up your
sins, incremental as lint, and as small, and consider:
are they yours, or have you just been borrowing them?
Either way, you’re self-cleaning: time and your two hands,
elbow grease, god bless, and a little warm water.
Nesting
First time she went to hang her clothes
in the windy yard, on the line,
she startled a nest of whirring wasps
between the back door and the screen.
Hundreds of sharp round abdomens,
an undulance of shine and wing,
had built their mud and paper home,
hung from the screen-door spring.
She shut the door quick, and watched them fly
from a tear in the screen, toward the sun,
but next day they were back. She took up her broom
to whack the thing from its anchor-line.
The anchor snapped with the first two strikes
and with the third, the nest fell,
carried down on a waspbuzz wake.
It rested on the sill.
Now they’d go, she thought, and closed
the door on the wreck she’d made.
But they swarmed the spring where their home had hung,
waiting in the shade.
She doused them with water, vinegar, soap,
hoping they’d burn and take off,
but they hardly noticed: just buzzed, settled down,
their silence a waspy fuck off.
She learned to walk under the ghost of the nest,
careful, her head held low.
No stings rained down, so she went in and out,
her arms full of newly washed clothes.
As fall came on, they’d crawl right in
the door, if she left it open.
Where could they go in the snowy cold?
She couldn’t keep back the wind.
She caught one with a paper and cup
in the kitchen one afternoon,
and carried it out the laundry door
to let it fly from the rim.
She lifted the page; the wasp perched on the edge—
antennae waved in the sun—
and looked around, but didn’t fly.
It crawled toward her thumb.
She threw the cup and paper down
on shadow-splashed concrete:
the porcelain cracked, and fragments scratched
over stone, just missing her feet.
She raised her eyes in time—the wasp
was lifting from her sight.
It led the rest. In a whirring line,
they flew from her, toward the light.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s first book of poetry, Ornament, received the Vassar Miller Prize and is forthcoming in spring 2017. Her projects include A Pocket Book of Forms—a travel-sized, fine-press guide to poetic forms—and her poems have recently appeared in the Southern Review, 32 Poems, and Colorado Review. The recipient of a 2016 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, she is editor of Ecotone and Lookout Books, and teaches at UNC Wilmington.