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

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

 

and tell him personally,

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.