Allison Field Bell
Break
How to write this country without writing chestnuts. Roasted and cracked, folded into paper cones. Our bodies slight and young and female, in a trot across ancient Turkish cobblestones.
Yesterday: the ferry to Asia, dark water choppy at the bow, sky a polluted haze. Today, by the Blue Mosque, you ask me how it feels to be a Pisces.
I know what you mean: how does it feel to be ill?
A brain in overdrive.
I take a lot of baths, I say. Something about water.
You’re a fish, you say.
We laugh, and you hum a song from our childhood. Something about a break, repeating. I’ve always taken it to mean the ocean.
Two years later, I will have my own break. I’ll be strapped to a hospital bed in California, flamed by florescence, muscles straining to get free, brain in incoherent loops.
But right now, you’re beside me on a bench humming. I can see the flutter of your breast beneath your shirt: heartbeat, breath. I reach for your hand and thread my fingers between yours.
How to write you without writing this country? Your body in a crowded market. Your lips, your long dark hair, the shape of you moving away from me.
Allison Field Bell
Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.