KENDALL A. BELL - POEMS

Kendall A. Bell's poetry has been most recently published in Edison Literary Review and Yellow Chair Review. He was nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net collection in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015. He is the author of twenty one chapbooks. His current chapbook is "We Are All Ghosts". He is the founder and co-editor of the online journal Chantarelle's Notebook, publisher/editor of Maverick Duck Press and a music and book reviewer with Five2One Magazine. His chapbooks are available through Maverick Duck Press. He lives in Southern New Jersey.

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Us, as verse
 

​Does the poem disintegrate slowly,
as we do, in the ways our breathing
changes, as our hearts beat in a new
rhythm? Does the poem get rewritten
so many times that it loses strength,
that it is as profound as greeting
card verse, that floors begin to
buckle from growing weight? Does the
poem keep us in freeze frame, or does
it write us out of existence? Does it
send us to the same moment repeatedly,
and do we find solace in familiarity?
Is the poem the beginning or the end?
 

It's shocking like your tongue
 

like the primal need that stays
barely hidden—the way you taste
like electricity, like copper
and saccharine. How two bodies
act like a conduit, like match
sticks. How we become embers,
become house fire, inferno.
The way fingers singe on metal.
It is the pulse and the gasp. 

​

My fingers were matches 
​

that would ignite when I ran them
in circles along your hips. Now,
they barely spark, are left only
with a flash and the smell of
sulphur. We leave on bathroom
lights to find a path, rely on
instinct, stay perfectly still.
Your body is an eroded cliff, a
steep drop off away from plunging
into shallow water where necks
crack and nothing survives. 

​

Omens
 

​Other kids told us that if we wanted
the swing to go higher, we needed to
tuck our legs back, then push them
back out while we swing. It was the
only way to get the kind of height
we wanted. Rich would furiously pump
his legs, pushing himself nearly
parallel with the top bar, the entire
structure shaking. I would slow down,
drag my heels along the dirt below
and rest, but he would leap from the
seat and hurl himself into the night
air, come crashing down into dandelion
dotted grass. He never broke a bone,
rolled over on his back and laughed
hysterically. I have been dragging
my feet every day since then.
 

Seeking distraction

​You are the empty bottles on
the floor on a Sunday night,
the disregard for what it will
bring in the morning. You are
the heaving after the guilt
after the dinner, the dessert,
the lack of attention from a
husband who would rather play
video games. You are the thin
slice of sharpened steel, the
acid reflux that has you bent
over in agony. You are untouched,
in a purgatory that leaves you
seeking distraction, needing
the brush and thrust of flesh.
You are the forgotten flower
between the pages of a long
ignored book—unquenched and
obscured.