Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Two poems from Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Might Could

followed by a note on the author

Petunia

Not that I ever liked you
before, but each spring
till now you’ve kept yourself
in the world, died back
to the plain ground
and come again, answering
no invitation of ours but saying
a trumpet’s yes to the part sun
by the front porch where once
presumably a hanging basket
waved above the brick,
above the sandy soil, long after
the first of you were taken
from their own places
but before they were made to live one
season only—or you escaped
that too, persisting, seeds
in the sand, seeds
in the antlion dens, returning
to make each summer
furred leaves and unabashed
purple flowers, deep and cool,
no hint of subtlety,
scent light and almost
irritatingly gentle
but there, inescapable,
making a one-plant world beside
the porch edge, and I like you
now, I know you now,
and now, six years here and well
into June, nothing
of you, no leaf, no sign.

 

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

 

Against Stoicism

An itch, untouched,
will twitch and wail

till an answering scratch
unhitches hell.

A tempered squeal
can conjure oil.

Squeak, wheel.
You may as well.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

 

Petunia first appeared in The Georgia Review, and Against Stoicism first appeared in The Sewanee Review.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New writing appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Orion, Electric Literature, West Branch, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and poets.org. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council’s Literature Fellowship program. Bell teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington and is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.