Francesca Bell

Poetry

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019) and the translator of Kitchens and Trains: Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals such as B O D Y, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, California.

 

The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market

The kitchen around it was demolished, rearranged. The refrigerator is now where we stopped to grab the tea kettle from its burner, but I cannot find a photograph that shows where they moved the stove or if there’s room anymore for the table where we ate with your parents the night I stopped being a vegetarian. I see the sink still in its location in front of the window I peer through out onto the evening, your father’s lawn tasteful and lush in memory’s soft light. Side by side, water running like time down the drain before us, we were near enough the same height that you didn’t have to bend when we finally turned and kissed after those years of your deployments and my plentiful boyfriends, after long nights rummaging separately in memory’s corridors. Our mouths still fit perfectly, that last kiss like a sanctuary, like a home, but also like the sad surprise of stumbling upon the listing for an address you thought you’d always have.

“ I recently peeked online to see if the beloved parents of an old boyfriend were still living. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was looking at the recent listing, complete with photographs, of their former home. The view out their kitchen window looked exactly as it did the last time I saw it, and I had the odd sensation of inhabiting two moments at once. Memory has always offered such experiences, but the internet has added a strange, new dimension to the act of looking back. ”

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