One Day, My Body
Francesca Bell
| poetry
I’m tethered
since the man
on the ridge,
limited to the path
between the backyards
and the cemetery.
This body is a rope
that swings me
over want’s abyss.
I am weak, succulent,
a magnet for men
who hide in the woods.
I knew that trail
like the ridges of
my own body
that rose up
and changed
everything.
It was my ridge,
the way once
it was my body,
when I was
lanky-straight
and invisible,
before possibility
unleashed itself,
month by month,
inside me. One day,
there was a stranger
on the trail
as one day,
my body curved
out of control
making men
do things
I regretted.
What makes a man
want a woman
dead
or pinned,
unmoving,
beneath him?
It’s bright here
on the fire road
between gardens
and graves.
Vultures perch
on the chimneys,
wings spread
to the new day.
A deer’s carcass rests
in the creek beyond
the chain link.
I am safe here
in the open
among the already
always deceased.
Francesca Bell’s poems and translations appear in many magazines, including ELLE, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Rattle. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). She lives with her family in Northern California.