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Write a flash piece or poem about a time you disappeared utterly in a good or bad way. What happened? Write about it. Let your lines tumble and make your piece both human and mundane and cosmic and bigger than yourself - either through your imagery or story or through metaphor.

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Open any book to a random page, close your eyes, and point to any line. Take all or part of that line and make it the last line of your poem. Now write a poem toward that ending.

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Write a poem about a food you love without telling us how it tastes.

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Write about the Loss of One of Your Senses

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Write about the Loss of One of Your Senses

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Write about the loss of one of your senses. Have you ever lost one, are you losing one, is one less awake than the others, do you fear losing one, do you have a family member who lost one and who could not see or hear or taste or smell who had trouble touching anyone? What sense do you fear losing most? What would you want to do before you lost this sense? What would you do for someone you love if they were to lose one of their senses?

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Write about right to life - any life, your life, a child's life, an embryo's life, the life of someone you despise or someone who harms or kills others, a life that harms you, a life you both love and hate. You can also write about your own life - what in your life kills you though it gives you life, and what in your life gives you joy and invigoration though it kills you? Work with opposites.

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Write a poem or flash piece about grief using only one of your senses. Tell us how grief sounds or tastes, for instance. Use the words: stench, bright, bitter, whisper, smooth.

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Write a Poem Inspired by a Current News Story

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Write a Poem Inspired by a Current News Story

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Write a poem inspired by a current news story, serious news or tabloid news. Use the topic to write about something personal.

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Write about misfortune. Simone Weil wrote, "Each time that we say, 'Thy will be done,' we should have in mind all possible misfortunes added together." Write a list poem in which each item on the list is one of your possible misfortunes.

Use the words unfold, gazebo, inventive, master, iris, sluice.

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As Francesca says, "The most difficult poem yet: write a dog poem!" It can be about loving or not loving a dog.

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Read this quote by Rumi. Write a love song to wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving, a poem of inclusivity for whoever is left out and not included, a poem of breaking vows and joy and redemption. Keep repeating 'Come, come, come..." First open a book randomly and select five interesting verbs, five interesting nouns, and five interesting adjectives that are descriptive and, if possible, sensory. Use as many as you can in writing your poem.

Post by Francesca Bell, prompt by Nynke Passi. (Francesca did not post a prompt on April 16, so this is in lieu of the missing prompt.)

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Write a poem about departure, about leave taking. This going can be literal or symbolic. What will you bring? What will you leave behind? Why are you going? Use the words: inert, slow, permanent, tender, green, implode.

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You can find Francesca Bell's new book What Small Sound here.

Bright Stain you can find here.

And here you can find her translations of Max Sessner's Whoever Drowned Here.

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Write a poem about an animal but abstain entirely from anthropomorphism.

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Perspective is everything. Write about someone or something zooming in or zooming out or both in order to examine both the micro and the macro.

Francesca says, "With today’s prompt, photos of my favorite oak." Originally this prompt had several oak perspectives: from one angle, another, up close, and then the bark. "How different a thing looks depending on how one does the looking."

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"I woke this morning in one of my favorite cities with a poem writing itself in my sleep. Today’s prompt uses a line from my sleep-self: Rung by rung, I climb sleep’s ladder."

Begin a poem with the line: "Rung by rung, I climb sleep's ladder." Tell us, are you going up or going down? Are you entering or exiting sleep? Tell us how the rungs feel in your hands.

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Francesca says, "Here’s today’s prompt. I’ll be doing my writing from the literal belly of the beast of my OG phobia: a plane across the country."

Write about your OG phobia. Describe it fully, extravagantly, even if it's embarrassing.

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Francesca says, "I can personally vouch for how freeing it is to write in voices not my own, and there’s an extra layer of fun to be found in imagining yourself into the form and sensibility of an object. (Don’t miss the product placement: I always write first in my decompositionbook ❤️). One of the poems I’ve most enjoyed writing, “The Bone Saw Speaks,” is in the voice of an object intimately involved in an act of violence. So, I can highly recommend this exercise.

Write a poem in the voice of an object that has been used to perpetrate an act of violence, large or small.

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Write a poem in which each line is a different metaphor or smile about the same thing.

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Francesca says: "First and last things take on a special meaning in our lives. This morning, I’m exploring one of mine." Write a poem about a first in your life. Tell us what changed as a result of it. Which doors opened? Which doors closed? Use the words: dream, fishing, dormant, abundant, severed, bleak.

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Imagine you are a tiny medical camera that's been sent into your own body. Choose an organ or system to examine and write a poem in which you report on your findings.

Bonus points for using no medical terminology.

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Write a love poem to what ails you. Be sure your tone is the tone you would use to address a beloved. Include the words sting, harrow, folly, nestle, bitter, envelop.

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Write an Epistolary Poem to A Person You've Not seen Half Your Life

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Write an Epistolary Poem to A Person You've Not seen Half Your Life

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As Francesca Bell says, "I have always loved to write letters, and I also love the notion that bonds between people can remain strong across enormous expanses of time and distance. Here’s a prompt that allows exploration of both."

Write an epistolary poem to a person you have not seen for at least half your life.

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Write an Aubade that begins and ends in darkness. Perhaps you have suffered a loss or are processing a grief. Put that in the poem.

From Poetry Foundation:

An aubade is a love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. The form originated in medieval France. See John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” and Louise Bogan’s “Leave-Taking.” A good example of an aubade embracing night, darkness, and death is Philip Larkin's "Aubade." Here is another one by L. Lamar Wilson, "Aubade Tanka." Or "Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs" by Torrin A. Greathouse and "Aubade" by David Mura.

Browse more aubade poems here.

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Write about your mother's body, in life or in death. Engage at least three senses and include the words falter, paper, scoop, jangle, and hollow.

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Write about a Historical Figure or Event

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Write about a Historical Figure or Event

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Francesca Bell says, "For nearly four years, I’ve wanted to write a poem about Lincoln’s shaving mirror which I looked into when I was in Springfield, Illinois for a reading. Maybe a humble but historically important object looms large in your imagination as well?"

Write about an historical figure or event by writing about an ordinary object that would have been present as a silent witness to large happenings. Use the words:

• Awry
• Enmity
• Rebellion
• Affirmed
• Reign
• Hanging

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Francesca Bell. Photo credit: Gina Risso.

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Francesca Bell was born in Spokane, Washington into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her maternal great-grandfather, the son of a prostitute and her client, was raised in a brothel. He raised his own six children, including Bell’s grandmother, on a 160-acre homestead in Plummer, Idaho. On her father’s side, the Norwegian Wikum family, when traced 700 years back, was already renowned for its spectacularly heavy drinking. The hard living continued in America where the clan was referred to around Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho as “the fighting Wikums.”

Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She has worked as a massage therapist, a cleaning lady, a daycare worker, a nanny, a barista, and a server in the kitchen of a retirement home.

Bell’s writing appears in many magazines including ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her translations appear in Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, River Styx, and Waxwing. Her first book, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, Red Hen Press will publish What Small Sound, her second book of poetry,  and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she has translated from German. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate.

Here you can find the Website of Francesca Bell | Poet

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Just Fuckin’ Do It Writing Prompt Series

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Just Fuckin’ Do It Writing Prompt Series

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This is an original Na-Po-Wri-Mo prompt circle originally created and curated by Mari Poet Laureate Francesca Bell for national poetry month 2023. She calls this the "Just Fuckin’ Do It Writing Prompt Series." She wrote about this original series, "I’m giving myself a poetry prompt each morning in April, and I’m posting them in case anyone wants to join me in trying to reclaim themself as a poet." Perhaps you want to reclaim yourself as a poet, too. And if you want to write flash, free writes, mini stories, or anything else, don't stop yourself from following your intuition.

Francesca Bell has been a frequent guest at our Soul Bone festivals. As a bonus, this circle includes some of Francesca's Soul Bone events, a generative prompt workshop on using odd tidbits of news and headlines to generate new material and a reading with Kate Gayle from Red Hen Press.

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Write the Poem You Are Afraid Will Get You Canceled 

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Write the Poem You Are Afraid Will Get You Canceled 

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Francesca Bell says, "I don’t know about you all, but I might have to use this one more than once." Write the poem you are afraid will get you canceled.  Use the following words:

• Mince
• Retire
• Brazen
• Sorry
• Grovel
• Please
• Green

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Francesca Bell says, "I thought we should engage in a little alliteration." Write an honest description of a torrid or tepid intimate encounter with yourself. Engage all five senses and use these words:

• crook
• cranny
• coddle
• crevice
• crevasse
• cudgel

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When was pleasure a spring coiled in your body? Write about it. Describe it in meticulous, sensory, sensuous detail. Make the experience complex. What was painful or terrifying about it? What was delicious and addictive and tender?

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Write about a Loss that Includes a Gain, a Pain that Includes a Beauty

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Write about a Loss that Includes a Gain, a Pain that Includes a Beauty

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Write about a loss that also includes a gain, a pain that includes a beauty. Do some research for your poem and include it - something not immediately evident, a link that leaps. Is there something that heals or improves your loss? Who or what is on the other end of that? Spin out the story of someone you don't know who is connected to you invisibly through a loss you suffer or suffered. First read "Conduction" by Francesca Bell.

CONDUCTION
by Francesca Bell

The man drives as closely to my car

as he can without making contact.

His truck window is down.

He is taking my right of way,

and I’m driving home, already crying,

from the audiologist’s office.

I’ve turned on the music

and have just been thinking

that somewhere in Denmark,

an engineer lays her head

on a pillow filled, perhaps,

with eiderdown, her mind stuffed

with equations she mastered

in order to write the code

for the music setting on my

new hearing aids. They cost me

as much as a used car

and will not rejuvenate

my cilia, cannot rebuild

this foundation that gradually

crumbles, but they have

resurrected, for this moment,

the voice of the trumpet

and polished its bright tones.

I cannot conceive

of how the years she bent

to her math books resulted

in this flashing beauty,

but I lean on it

the way a person leans

on a crutch when her knee

has given out, the way

I lean on Telemann who wrote

this concerto almost 300 years ago,

each note big enough

to compensate—across time—for loss,

for the man passing slowly by,

menace blaring from his eyes,

as, triumphant, he raises

his middle finger like a baton.

—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

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Francesca Bell CONDUCTION

The man drives as closely to my car

as he can without making contact.

His truck window is down.

He is taking my right of way,

and I'm driving home, already crying,

from the audiologist's office.

and have just been thinking

that somewhere in Denmark,

an engineer lays her head

on a pillow filled, perhaps,

with eiderdown, her mind stuffed

with equations she mastered

in order to write the code

for the music setting on my

new hearing aids. They cost me

this foundation that gradually

resurrected, for this moment,

and polished its bright tones.

of how the years she bent

to her math books resulted

on a crutch when her knee

I lean on Telemann who wrote

this concerto almost 300 years ago,

to compensate-across time-for loss,

for the man passing slowly by,

menace blaring from his eyes,

as, triumphant, he raises

his middle finger like a baton.

__________

Francesca Bell: "I write poetry in order to record the world's strange symphony of abundance and loss, so I can play it back and try to make sense of it." ( web)

Francesca Bell SMALL PARTS

After the plumbers leave, having installed

new toilets because the old ones failed

to whisk fully away what our bodies discarded,

and we are of an age where we crave

the satisfaction of good and final riddance,

of never seeing again what we have chosen

to set down, the ultimate, sweet pleasure

of divestment, and after they have accidentally

allowed my old beagle to escape, and I walk

up and down the streets calling and whistling

and return to find her waiting at the front door,

triumphant, a long-dead bird's leg bones gripped

in her mouth, talons still attached,

I read in the paper that a foot was found on a beach

in Richmond, still laced into its Saucony shoe,

and the article asks breezily for the public's assistance,

as if someone has unwittingly lost a right foot,

size 6 or 7, perhaps while out running,

before going on to clarify that every couple

of months, small parts of people wash up

on Bay Area beaches, mostly fingers or feet broken

loose at the water's slow insistence

from the bodies of suicides who've tossed themselves

whole from one bridge or another, dropping

as that bird must have, finished finally

with the entire enterprise, believing the Bay

to be as powerful as a new toilet, able to afford

a person the simple luxury of washing away

the whole stinking, burdensome mess,

but something keeps keeping us,

a scavenging dog, a tide, a faulty toilet,

even the Bay unable to stop our little bits,

our wasted, torn-apart pieces

from clinging to shore in refusal.

__________

Francesca Bell: "The day I read about the running shoe that washed up on a Richmond beach still holding its foot, I really was having my toilets replaced, and my beagle really did escape out the propped-open front door, and she really was waiting for me, after my fruitless search for her, carrying someone else's leg bones in her mouth. All of it got me thinking about how difficult it is to ever be completely finished with or free of anything. We humans cling to pretty much everything, it's true, but this world is sticky in its own way and seems also to not want to let us go." ( web)

Max Sessner ONE DAY

Everything comes back to haunt us

stands before you in the street car

he is like you now around

Translated from the German by Francesca Bell

__________

Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He has long lived with his wife in Augsburg and has held a wide variety of jobs, working as a bookseller for the Augsburg public library, and currently for the department of public health. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including, most recently, Das Wasser von Gestern (The Water of Yesterday). | Francesca Bell: "I first came upon the poems of Max Sessner in the pages of the Austrian literary journal manuskripte. I was reading German-language journals with an eye toward finding a poet in whose work I could immerse myself, and those first eleven Sessner poems caught my attention and held it fast. I wrote immediately to ask permission to translate them. In Max Sessner's work, I found a poetry that is simultaneously melancholy and funny, deeply tender and yet eviscerating. His voice is entirely, profoundly his own, and his poems, deceptively accessible, contain complex, often uncanny, ideas and sentiments. I remain fascinated and humbled by how deftly he uses surrealism, not to obscure reality, but to illuminate it." ( web)

Francesca Bell SANDWICHES

I decide it would be a good idea to write them down,

the first four things you're likely to forget on your journey

down dementia's long path, a path that will

eventually be strewn with all your discarded memories

the way the path to the person dead from hypothermia

is strewn with their cast-off articles of clothing

that lie bright and useless on the snow.

But I can't remember them.

I'm pretty sure there are four things, but four is

my lucky number, and maybe I've merely glommed

onto what is familiar, the way a person who's wandered

off-course might walk in whatever wrong direction

most resembles home. I try searching my phone,

where I read the piece, but it turns out I can't find the way

to my phone's memory either, and when I Google

four things you may forget and signs of dementia,

several lists of ten items appear, and ten is at least six

too many to keep track of, so I don't bother

writing any of it down.

For some reason, this reminds me of the story

I told last night at dinner, a story I meant to take note of,

but first, I think, since I'm constructing records,

I should finally make that list

of all the men I've slept with. So I do,

but I reach early on one name I simply cannot summon,

the name of the guy who took me

to the snow for a whole day and only brought

one sandwich, which turned out to be just

what sleeping with him was like: a trip to the cold

with only half a sandwich to hold you.

I write Sandwiches where his name should be and go on.

But when I reach the end of the list,

my lifetime total is five under

what I thought I tallied years ago

meaning five additional names

and the men they belong to may

(or may not) have leapt from memory's cliff.

Frustrated, I turn the page

to write the story I told at last night's dinner-

a story I might, in fact, have told my family before,

now that I think of it-and find that it, too, has vanished

along with those men I now can neither remember

nor forget, men who may have entered my body without leaving

so much as a trace on my mind.

Perhaps it will return to me later,

the story. Maybe even the men

will wander back across my blinkered

brain, naked, with or without

sandwiches, maybe a little snow falling

outside the window, their penises

memorable this time, overpowering enough

that my mind will finally have

something solid to hold onto.

But I don't really think so.

I don't think I'll find the way

Or to the article about the four early

losses of dementia, one more list of losses,

too many losses to possibly keep

There is a name for this precise feeling,

I know there is, this feeling that wells

and wells and almost spills over.

of different ways to name sorrow,

but, though I sit for a long time

__________

Francesca Bell: "When I read this article about four things a person might first become forgetful about as they begin to develop Alzheimer's, I thought I ought to keep a little eye on myself. But I promptly forgot the four things I should be watching for. And the name of the article. And where I had read it. Which ended up inspiring a bumpy trip down memory lane and this poem." ( web)

Francesca Bell WHAT SMALL SOUND

In the audiologist's booth I clutch the device with the button

I'm to press if I hear a tone, hand clammy, the way

a child holds the finger of an adult she thinks can save her.

Behind the one-way glass, my ears are cupped in the pinching

headset, cilia becalmed, the quiet so thick I cannot stop

myself from thinking of Jupiter, its plentiful moons

I'm afraid to look at through the telescope, the stillness out there strong

enough to suck me in. What small sound might those moons make,

spinning in their vacuum, while I sit for what I know is too long

between tones? I'm here to bear witness to this deafness

that expands imperceptibly, the way the universe, they say,

is expanding even as my world narrows, sound swirling round the drain

of this loss. Into the silence of the audiologist's booth

fall consonants, vowels, rain against my windows, my lover's voice

disappearing like a star's light being swallowed and swallowed as it dies.

- from Rattle #72, Summer 2021

__________

Francesca Bell: "I first noticed that I had begun to lose my hearing when I was 24. I was especially attuned to hearing loss, having spent nearly my whole life watching my mother lose hers. My loss, thankfully, has not been as precipitous as my mother's. She was in her 20s when she got her first hearing aids and is functionally deaf by now. I was able-with difficulty and with great forbearance on the part of my family-to make it to 50 before finally addressing my growing disability. I never take for granted the magic and the privilege of having hearing aids, the new ease they lend to my life, but I absolutely dread the hearing tests that are now part of my routine. I've seldom felt so acute an isolation as when I sit in the little booth trying to hear what I no longer can." ( web)

Francesca Bell HEART IN A BOX
It was captured, like so much else, on video.

The helicopter's slow approach.

How it seemed to sidle in the air, toward the hospital roof, where it meant to land.

How the machine faltered and, faltering, began to spin, shedding debris-the way a person in moments of loss will sometimes shed hubris-before it surrendered, finally, to gravity and dropped to its side.

It rested there, as if disoriented, until first responders helped the pilot and passengers out, nearly unscathed.

Then, with the Jaws of Life, the donor heart, trapped in the wreckage, was pried free, still beating in its box.

As it used to beat beneath a chest's fertile field before doctors made a furrow in the flesh and split an archway of bone to harvest it.

As a woman's belly is sometimes sliced open and a whole new person hauled out.

As someone's love can pull you from your life's dark cavity into the light.

Onscreen, you can watch the man in scrubs scoop the box into his arms and dash across the helipad.

Maybe it's his patient whose heart decays inside.

Maybe he's thinking of his ex-lover's pulse, how it used to quicken beneath his touch.

Maybe he trembles, remembering, as the severed heart dances against his chest.

You can watch him cradle it before he trips, see his grip tighten just before he begins to fall.

See the heart skitter away.

Imagine the man's own heart as it plummeted.

How it clenched its battered fist inside him and then went on.

__________

Francesca Bell: "In the midst of all of the big political news and the devastating pandemic news, a smaller story captured my attention this week, the story of a helicopter bearing a donor heart that crashed atop the hospital where a patient awaited a transplant. It was amazing that none of the three people in the helicopter sustained serious injuries, but how incredible that the donor heart was found intact and rescued from the wreckage. That would have been story enough, but once the heart, safe in its travel box, was handed off to a member of the hospital staff, it was dropped. In his rush, the man carrying the heart across the helipad tripped over a metal plate, and the heart flew from his grasp as he fell. The organ survived all of this and was transplanted successfully that day. Of additional interest to me is the relatively new technology used to transport harvested hearts. They are kept beating, circulating blood, at just the right temperature in what is called a 'heart in a box' device." ( web)

Francesca Bell LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 for my husband, 21 years my senior

I could have killed you.

After 28 years of marriage-

the sting of my split skin

of the raw years.

in the water's reassuring scald,

__________

Francesca Bell: "I wrote this poem after reading an article about how, in Italy, doctors no longer intubate anyone over the age of 60. The United States hasn't yet reached that point, but we seem far likelier to achieve the catastrophe of Italy than we do to arrive at the relative calm of South Korea, so it got me thinking about my 74-year-old husband. I make the groceries last as long as possible, but after going out today, I had to wonder if I'd carried a death sentence home to that beloved, maddening man." ( web)

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Francesca Bell CONDUCTION The man drives as closely to my car as he can without making contact. His truck window is down. He is taking my right of way, and I'm driving home, already crying, from the audiologist's office.

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Lessons and Looking Backward at the Future

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Lessons and Looking Backward at the Future

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Read "Lessons" by Francesca Bell.

Write about looking backward at the future, about lessons. Weave in conversation, ordinary fragments of your life, some science, some dialogue. What have you learned or not learned? Include contradictions. Play with form.

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Lessons

My daughter dreads middle school science

because all they study is cataclysm,

end-stopped species after end-stopped species,

earth's slow dwindling.

There is no longer a world to study

that teems with life, not a globe ecstatic

in its wild spinning. Day after day,

they regard the crumbling edge,

broken asphalt where a road runs out

and we launch ourselves like lemmings

over the side. When I was a girl,

my most lasting science experiment consisted

of pinching pieces one by one from

my mother's impatiens plants then watching

through a tiny drinking glass as

each stalk sent new roots fingering out

into the water. My daughter sits quiet

in science through all the bad news.

She sits quiet during the active shooter

drills, even the one that goes on so long

her teacher thinks it is the real thing,

and she's quiet in the car after the birthday

party for the girl whose mom was killed

by that crazy man in Las Vegas. I tell her I want to go

solar, because of global warming, and she says

she hates science, and I keep thinking

of the IRS auditor we had-the one who truly regretted

telling us what a shoddy bookkeeper I am-

how he used to be a CPA and missed it.

His clients all had futures back then,

and he helped to plan them.

Being an IRS agent is all forensics

the way 8th grade science is all

forensics now. The way when I think

of the future, it's more like looking

at an ending than a beginning. Like

performing an autopsy on something

even as it keeps on living. At dinner,

my daughter reminds me she hates

vegetables, says I should let her

eat whatever she wants to now, while

she's young and still can. Looking

backward at her future, I think

she may be right. Maybe it already

will not matter.

https://thepedestalmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Lessons-online-audio-converter.com_.mp3

Frog of God

When the vet prescribes medicine for your frog,
you think it smells all wrong but use it anyway,
dousing him with goodness of heart,
watching his smooth body drink it in-
and see you've begun to kill him.

His beautiful, turquoise skin darkens and lesions open on it.
You rinse him in spring water,
but he's dying, big eyes gone cloudy.

Everyone tells you
he was just a frog,
but you know
he was a frog of God,
fat green Buddha on his branch.

Now, he looks like the baby in Hiroshima,
burned flesh peeling off. Now, he stares
as you cross the room with eyes
like the eyes of Auschwitz trying to capture
the world's averted gaze.

He could almost be Christ Himself,
emptying the bitter cup
that you, with such pure intentions,
filled to overflowing.

https://thepedestalmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Frog-of-God-online-audio-converter.com_.mp3

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019) and the translator of Kitchens and Trains: Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in such journals as B O D Y, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, California.

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Lessons My daughter dreads middle school science because all they study is cataclysm, end-stopped species after end-stopped species, earth's slow dwindling. There is no longer a world to study that teems with life, not a globe ecstatic in its wild spinning.

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Write about rejections. Turn the tables. Use metaphor and humor. Pour out your heart.

I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand
by Francesca Bell

and tell him personally,

I’m sorry, but I’m going

to have to pass on this.

Though your piece

held my attention through

the first few screenings,

I don’t feel it is a good fit

for me at this time.

Please know it received

my careful consideration.

I thank you for allowing

me to have a look,

and I wish you

the very best of luck

placing it elsewhere.

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I LONG TO HOLD THE POETRY EDITOR'S PENIS IN MY HAND
to have to pass on this.

held my attention through

the first few screenings,

I don't feel it is a good fit

for me at this time.

my careful consideration.

- from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Francesca Bell: "I write poetry in an attempt to draw as close as possible to the world around me and to the people in it. For me, poetry should be intimate, bare, wild, and a little ragged. If you can't go for your own jugular, you shouldn't write." ( web)

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"I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor's Penis in My Hand" by Francesca Bell

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Francesca Bell I LONG TO HOLD THE POETRY EDITOR'S PENIS IN MY HAND and tell him personally, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to pass on this. Though your piece held my attention through the first few screenings, I don't feel it is a good fit for me at this time.

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Reading with Francesca Bell, Tiffany Midge, and Kate Gayle at the Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival

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Reading with Francesca Bell, Tiffany Midge, and Kate Gayle at the Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival

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Here you can view a reading with Francesca Bell, Tiffany Midge, and Kate Gayle at the Spring '22 Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival.

Francesca Bell’s poems appear in magazines such as ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Waxwing. She is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She the author of The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014.

Poet Tiffany Midge is the author of several chapbooks and the full-length poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press, 1996); The Woman Who Married a Bear. She published a memoir, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's (Nebraska Press), and her work has been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, and more.

Link to the Spring '22 Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival page here.
Link to the Soul Bone℠ website here.