poem: Elana Bell

Charter for the over-sung country

Live in me like blood,
like my name, like the numbers
tattooed on my grandmother’s arm,
like my mother’s milk and her slow
disease. I’ve tried to run away;
You are not a place.
I’ve built a house of bricks
to keep out heavy weather.
The house falls down,
your smell comes in:
eucalyptus, salt, the goat on the altar.
I’ve barely undone your strap.
How long like this? I eat
your sands until I’m sick.
No one tells me I’ve had enough.
All night the ram horn’s wail,
the sound of you, calls me
to a house that’s burning.
You are not a place my love.
You come from where
there are no names. You enter
like breath and drop
onto our sleeping tongues.

You’ve multiplied a thousand times.

ELANA BELL was selected as the winner of the 2004 Stephen Dunn Poetry Award. and holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Drisha Institute. A resident artist with the LouderARTS Project, Elana has been a featured poet at numerous venues throughout New York City and abroad, including the NuYorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Cornelia Street Cafe, and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Simla, India. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Storyscape, Words and Images Magazine, Parse, Clamor, Mima’akim and Poetz.com. Elana serves as the writer-in-residence for the Bronx Academy of Letters and sings with the acappella trio Saheli.