Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: Allison Field Bell’s “Across the Street” unfolds like the recounting of a distant memory. Through a mosaic of fractured images, we understand pieces of the setting and pieces of the violence that was done there. But this withholding of narrative impresses on us that the poem isn’t just about the violence itself but rather about its imprint on the girl who keeps it in her memory, the “worse than dirt girl” with “zero opportunity to flee.”
To hear Allison read the poem, click below:
Across the Street
Blackberries. Chamomile. Dark shapes of cloud. Every evening the sun descends there, beyond the tree fort crafted with plywood, a father’s leftover supply. Finally, the girls and the boys have the place they had begged and saved for. Great piles of pennies. Here is a real place to call home, to have their own clubhouse / spy turret / tea room / bird’s nest. In the evenings they assemble there. Just Kindness / Love / Mayhem. Never tell nobody, Jack says. Jack says, Or else. Or else. Or else, what, Jack? Persephone does not so much mind the consequence of pomegranate. Question: would you mind, Jack? Really. Stop with the talk about else, or else or else or else what? What about half a year, every year, in hell? Tell me about the time in the tree fort with the girl—tree-fort hell. Under her skirt does not belong to you, Jack. Very bad behavior, Jack. Would you want a girl down there, under a shirt or pants where she does not belong, uninvited? Exactly right, Jack. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t. Zero opportunity to flee, flee from fort through blackberry net—blood and blackberry, blackberries for cobbler, not for nets—next, the chamomile slipper feet, and thank god, thank Demeter, thank plywood and dads and pennies and not Jack—not you, Jack, thank you not; the girl flees through blackberry, chamomile, dark cloud shape at dusk; the girl tunnels under blackberry, under chamomile—the in the dirt girl, under the dirt, worse than dirt girl, cannot tell Dad girl, hating Jack girl, hating tree fort / clubhouse / spy turret / tea room / bird’s nest, hating self girl, do not hate self, girl: zero opportunity to flee, girl.
Allison Field Bell holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and is pursuing her PhD in fiction at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, West Branch, Shenandoah, The Pinch, Florida Review, Fugue, New Madrid, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.
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