Beyond the Window/In Silence

Two poems by Kay Bell

Salvadore Dali: “Figure at a Window”

Beyond the Window

            after Salvador Dali’s Figure at a Window

Beyond the window

where the water brings

the handsome things

 a song overrides the wreck

I listen

for where the day meets sunrise

and a lovers’ quarrel can be heard

across the bay

in a small kitchen   lit with soft white light

I listen

for a Wednesday paradox;

an old man whistling   hola

in a goodbye boat

I listen

to the hum of raggedy curtains

blue with truth

and a dish towel   set aside

to wipe away my dread

I listen

to what I have refined within a woman;

the wind against my youth

groves of uttering shrubs

            fields of sky;

tattered leather flats

a whole wide world

cast-away

and these cabin fever hips

that soon again   will dance

In Silence

every place I’ve been    hurts

and each year is symmetrical to the face in the mirror

and each room is filled with gravel breathing   

and each woman is more whole than me

and each time I choose to live            I am a phantom sound           

resting against my father

and each body I have borrowed   quakes

and each pair of hands                        bears bite marks

and each page is a box            with a theory     written in blood

and each song is a wound    is a creature      is a riot    is me with balled fists

and each hour ends   in the dirt   face down

and each minute of solitude       is animal     is my body of rust    slaughtered     

near the edge      unseen

like chalk      on a sidewalk       washed away by rain  

Kay Bell is the author of the poetry chapbook, Cry Sweat Bleed Write (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020). She received her MFA from The City College of New York where she was the 2015 recipient of the Esther Unger Poetry Prize, and the 2018 co-recipient of the David Dortort Prize in Creative Writing for Non-Fiction. Kay lives in the Bronx and considers herself a bibliophile. @iamkaybell