Note: This transcription is edited to facilitate the reading experience. For the best viewing, please read on a desktop or horizontal on your phone :) | Read my review of Black Bell in Honey Literary
DeeSoul Carson: You know it sounds silly, but especially when I think of poetry as an art form that, first and foremost, lives in the public sphere, right? Like, I feel like poetry being a private-ish thing is more new, in the broad history of poetry. So I’m just like, we are, we’re performers. That’s more or less what we do, but we’re trying to give our work to the public. You gotta know what gets the people going!
DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, an O, Word? podcast series interested in poets, the title poems of their collections, and how their work finds its way into our hands. Today’s episode is on Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins.
Alison C. Rollins is the author of the poetry collections Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes. Rollins holds an MFA from Brown University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Alison, hello!
Alison C. Rollins: Hello!
DC: How is it going?
ACR: It’s going well! And before we get started, I just wanted to give, as a former librarian, a shout out to you for the labor that you put into this podcast and just cultivating a reading community and really sitting thoughtfully with the work. I cannot tell you how much it means to have the work be engaged with, with that level of rigor and intensity, and it’s a true delight and treat to be on the podcast.
DC: Oh, that is so sweet! Thank you so much. I’ve been in my bag recently trying to get more people to read. I was just talking to my editor earlier this morning, and we were talking about poetry collections. We were like, yeah, people love to read poems one-off, but like, how do we read poetry as a group and a collection of artifacts?
So yeah, I mean, I was happy to. It’s a terrific book. It’s so fun to interact with. I’m sure I’ll ask you a little bit about this later, but something that I really love in the collection is your emphasis on performance.
ACR: Yes.
DC: I got into poetry doing spoken word, and as I’ve gone through the MFA and been in other kinds of spaces than I have been in for Spoken Word and slam, I’ve seen all kinds of engagements with the page. I often see that movement from the stage to the page, but not very often do I see the page then reflect back some of [those] performance elements. So I really appreciate that about your work.
And speaking about the book, Black Bell, I know from reading that the title is named after a physical artifact, this contraption of iron horns and bells, so I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the artifact and what drew you to it as you approached the writing of this collection?
ACR: Mm-hmm. I went down an interesting rabbit hole, I think, at the time… searching visual images of fugitivity. So, it started with a familiarity with Henry ““Box”” Brown, which I feel like most people have [as] an understanding of as a kind of canonical figure as it relates to fugitivity or enslaved persons escaping to freedom famously, or with a lot of public display.
I stumbled upon this image of a woman wearing this contraption that had an attachment around her neck and her waist. These three large tiers up above her, and I think it’s 12 total bells, or more than that, dangling above her head. And the pose, the way in which her body is posed, is very graceful. It looks almost like a statuesque dancer. But the weight, or the knowledge of the cumbersome nature of the actual structure of torture and punishment for her trying to escape did not align at all with the beauty of her body.
I was really captivated by what it meant to be made a spectacle in that way, the sound of that form of torture and the image or beauty of her body in that pose. And so I just kept returning to the image over and over again. It was a person I did not have a name for, there was no citation in terms of her. And then I found later Moses Roper, in a mid-19th century slave narrative, writes about her, this particular contraption, and she’s punished or caught wearing it, having traveled four miles.
And so this notion of fours in the book — it was previously called Quartet for the End of Time, which I could talk about later — but it has four sections. And so I was just thinking about, like, to wear for four miles this structure, to be making that noise or sound on foot as a method of escape. I wanted to be in dialogue with her in a collaborative way, or in thinking about sound making, utterance, silence, or quiet versus loudness. It really just grew out of an obsession, finding this particular image in the archive and really sitting with it as I wrote the book.
DC: Yeah, I mean, there’s this interesting thing you’re saying here as I’m thinking about fugitivity as it relates to spectacle, or rather the spectacle that we make, especially in this nation of fugitives, right? We have the 10 most wanted, when we had that whole Luigi Mangione thing, it became a whole nationwide [event].
In this book you have… there are so many artifacts within the collection, and I’m thinking about the poem that… it includes “Queen Lear” and I can’t think of the name of the other poems, but it has all the clippings of…. What are those called? The ads?
ACR: Slave ads. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
DC: Yeah. There’s the whole production of looking for these slaves, the description of these slaves. So just thinking about, what does it mean for our bodies to be physically marked and cataloged this way, right? I mean, I’m sure you also have thoughts on the cataloging or inventory, especially as someone who’s a librarian, and the energies that includes. There’s some really interesting valences there.
I would actually love to hear more about the original title, Quartet for the End of Time, and maybe even how changing the name of the collection maybe made the collection as a whole change its focus, or change its shape. And then maybe even what remained from the original idea.
ACR: Yeah, so that title is taken from a composition by Olivier Messiaen, who composed it in 1941 while a prisoner of war in Germany. And he had other fellow imprisoned men perform for other prisoners and the guards. And he’s borrowing from biblical images or notions of bird songs and sound and thinking about immortality or God’s love and relationship to music making and utterance. And so originally, I was like, I love this title. I love the concept, again, of the four, the quartet. I’m obsessed with death. I was re-looking at a notebook I had where I was just taking notes [on] like philosophy, literary theory, poetry, looking at death, which sounds morbid, but I find really interesting.
The concept of resurrection, scientifically and spiritually, is absolutely fascinating to me, and that kind of echoes throughout the book as well. But this notion of being literally in a state of imprisonment in a quite barren landscape in Germany with minimal access to things, cold, and making art and music and having a collective kind of public performance in nature and the value of both making music and enjoying community-engaged listening to that production in the time of war and actual imprisonment was just so fascinating to me. And I sat with my husband, the poet Nate Marshall. We were thinking about it and I was like, this will be the title for the book. And then I had the Black Bell series and he was like, “no, I think it’s Black Bell.”
And I was like, “damn, I think, I think you’re fucking right.” Like, I was like —
DC: Like he might have ate with that one.
ACR: I was like, I think it’s just Black [Bell] — because I love… a lot of my work and my thinking is highly referential. I’m always in conversation. I’m never standing or presenting or writing alone. It was a more arguably inventive or original departure, having it be Black Bell.
DC: I definitely want to come back to that referentiality, which is another thing that I loved about this collection. I’m a person that loves talking about referential texts. But before I do that, I wanna talk more about these title poems, as that is the aim of this podcast series
ACR: Sure.
DC: For anyone who hasn’t listened, as one reads the book, they will discover that “Black Bell” is not the name of one eponymous poem, but there are four in the collection that are encountered across it, one [in] each section.
Each of the poems invites us to strike a bell of a different note before reading it. The note in the back of the book concerning these poems invites us to reflect on our own encounters with bells in the world. Something I was wondering is — what have been your own encounters with bells, formative or otherwise, that informed your approach to these poems?
ACR: As a child, I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade. And so, spirituality or the church setting for me was very much associated with bells or the sounding of bells to signal time, to signal the start of a religious ceremony or procession. For me, that was probably what was most grounding. I think in popular culture, in civic or political space or in social settings, the notion of a public square with the bell (the Liberty Bell), these symbolic references also ruminated for me. And then most recently, getting into more meditation, sound healing; I bought the bells from a black woman in the UK who makes them and uses them for sound healing.
I was thinking a lot about — especially also at my time at Brown — Alexis Marie Brown’s notion of echolocation, sound waves, sounds as things that we experience kind of ricocheting through our body and nervous system, as a method of healing. Those were some of the things I was ruminating on or thinking about.
DC: There is this interesting — I feel like I need to remove the word “interesting” from my vocabulary. I use that every time I start a comment, but I do think everything is interesting, which is actually my real issue. I think everything is interesting. But there is a thought I’m having regarding bells and resonance, and I think that feels very present in your collection. Like the way that a bell, you strike it, but that’s not the end of the sound. It reverberates across the collection. I think a lot of these poems, what’s happening within them, “linger” is really what I’m thinking of. There’s things that stay with me when I move away from them, and I’m thinking about this specifically with the ones that are less textual, right?
You were talking before about this, this woman that inspired the, in the archive, that inspired the name of the collection. And she comes up pretty early in the collection, in “The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading Female Figures.” It’s the image of a woman with iron horns and bells on to keep her from running away next to the image of a piece of a musical composition, but also has this white woman in this dress dancing. So there’s the juxtaposition of those two figures, and also this idea, the visual of the woman with the bell that I think stays with me as I go on through the collections.
Like the next poem is one of the “Black Bell” series. So there’s the actual sound of the bell now in my ear. When I was reading the poems, I actually went online and found like, there’s these tingsha bells from this guy in the temple, and different notes. In these particular videos, he continues to strike the bell, and so I read the poem at the cadence of the bell being [struck] and that created a very interesting kind of reading, but it’s just the idea of that. And there’s so much music in this collection!
DC: You make so much reference to music, like Sun Ra is a big reference for you. I would love to hear more about your connection to Sun Ra, especially as it applies to this collection.
ACR: I love, and I sometimes find it’s been maybe politicized, like the notion of a spoken word artist in contrast, perhaps to the page or to the written word. Because I think about the vocality of utterance, like what it means when we go to do a public reading or whatever from the book.
I remember when my first book came out, going to do readings and people having certain expectations for what the language would sound like in my mouth, for good and bad, being like, “this was a sad reading,” or “I thought it was gonna be more interactive” or whatever.
Some people that just really do not do well with reading their work aloud. And I think “Why did I come to this reading?” I could just sit at home and sit with the work in silence by myself. You’re not really thinking about what it means to occupy collective space and be in dialogue or a medium of reciprocity with listeners. And so, for me, and I think my husband Nate also says this, the poem is a type of musical score, directing the pace with which, the breadth with which people take, the way in which they move or orchestrate through their reading and experience. And so to me, that is not necessarily disparate from — it’s different, but also connected to the musical listening experience as well.
Like to your earlier point about a lot of poems become one-offs versus a whole-collection reading experience. The same way that I might go to Spotify and listen to that one top hit or one joint, or I listened to track number five, but I don’t bother to listen to the one through four that precede it, what does it mean to be able to kind of chop and screw or remix in that way to engage.
DC: Hmm.
ACR: And actually, a lot of my reading practice for poetry collections, and I maybe shouldn’t admit this, even as an educator, I would do this thing, I would rarely sit with a whole book. I’d open it or be in the bookstore, leaf through it, turn to page 12, “that poem was dope, “interesting,” like, I wasn’t really actively engaging with it as a whole thing.
And so that type of play or engagement, I’m actually kind of, I think into or find more resonant or interesting and, for me again, I don’t know why, I just think musicality lives alongside the poetic lyric for me, very much, like in this book, I compare like Dante’s Inferno to Wutang clan, those need to sit together for me.
I’m not gonna engage with canonical Italian literature and spirituality without also thinking about Wu-Tang. I think those juxtapositions are fun and playful and exciting. I don’t know. I’m not really much of a musician. I’m not a very good singer, but if I could, I think I would be in the vein of Sun Ra. I think a lot about Aretha Franklin’s album, especially in relation to this collection.
DC: There are so many poets who I love to hear read their work. So I’m thinking first and foremost, like Morgan Parker. Love to hear her read her work. Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, ‘cause who doesn’t love listening to Danez do their poetry.
I thank God every day that I did slam and I did theater, because you’re absolutely right. There’s some people whose work I’ll read on the page, and I do have expectations because I’m a person that reads their work. And so I’m like, “oh, I can imagine how this poem is gonna sound.”
And then they read it and I go, “wow, this is not what you wrote.” Like, I’m looking at the score, right? I’m not a musician, but like in the same vein, I’m reading poems as if they’re a score. I’m like, I could see what you wrote. And you’re not singing that song, you’re not playing the tune that you wrote out.
If I could conduct… I wish MFA programs would have a performance component. Like, I wish there was a class on reading.
ACR: It’s also, I got a performance certificate at Brown during my MFA. Like, I just elected to do that separately. And there was something about just — it sounds so cliche and like self help-ish — like, finding confidence in your voice. Like what? But it’s like, you’re at the graduate level studying to hopefully perfect, if that’s even what we’re reaching for. I’m never really reaching for mastery. I think that’s impossible and disinteresting, as it pertains to craft, kind of White-supremacist based.
But stepping into your voice, being able to command a space, to be in vocal dialogue with others in a way that is not shrinking or actively making yourself small or actively trying to disengage is in itself a type of art. I hesitate to use the type of the word like “calling,” but there’s something about the preacher, there’s something about the comedian even. There’s the person who’s able to rely on language to let people have an experience, to laugh, to be moved, to be called towards a higher power.
I think those trainings are really important. And I’ve even been in spaces where sometimes it’s like, do you even want to say your name? Are you feeling affirmed in saying who you are? Like where you come from? I think especially for marginalized subject identities especially, it’s like, you have to be able to claim, to stand 10 feet down —like 10 toes down, you don’t have 10 feet, 10 toes down in the moment —
DC: But that’s the energy you need though, 10-feet energy.
ACR: Exactly.
DC: Like even the confidence that I’ve gained from watching…I grew up in a Baptist church. And I think I used to be self-conscious about going up, speaking in front of people, that sort of thing. But what I think about now, especially like performance artists, thinking about preachers, is the reaction I have when I see someone else fully embody their work. Because I think when I’m doing it myself, I’m like, “oh, that’s cringe” or whatever, you know, and maybe we need to get rid of the idea of, the fear of cringe. Because we can get to like some really great stuff on the other side of cringe.
But also the idea, like, when I see someone else do it, I always go, “wow, that’s so cool,” because they’re really owning their space, like the space that we have given them. I came to their place and sat there to listen to them. And I think about that sometimes. I’m like, “oh, well people are here to listen to me. I guess I should give them something.”
ACR: Yes, yes.
DC: I’m gonna, I’m gonna go back now to what you were talking about with referentiality, because you do have a really lovely note section and I don’t often see note sections this detailed.
I love the notes section ‘cause I love to see what poets are thinking about. The last book that I read that had a notes section like this was Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home, which is a lovely collection. And she similarly is someone working in the archive. I loved what she was doing there and I loved to see what you’re doing here. This book, I think, largely asks us to reflect on those who have come before or who are working alongside with.
There’s Phillis Wheatley in this collection speaking through Turing Tests, in the spirit of Franny Choi, which I absolutely love. There are poems after Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton. This note section reveals to us that this is a collection of deep reverence and respect to a wealth of texts and music and art and so on. And so I’m just wondering how it feels for you to be in conversation with all the people that are in this collection. And then, what is your general relationship to the “after” poem?
ACR: I’ve heard people describe this collection as a type of call and response, and I think maybe that also might be how I conceptualize the “after” poem. It’s a polyvocal communication rather than a one-directional communication, and I think about that, not just in reference or relationship to the past or people that have passed, but also in relationship to the future.
Like, futurity was really important to me in this collection as well. I think so often it’s like, “oh, we’re just, it’s a historical book” or “it’s a book seeped in the archive.” And that has nothing to do with fantasy or science fiction or future pursuits, or even pleasure seeking or eroticism is necessarily binary or different from the past or history or pain. The work, or the way that I think, is always a constellation, it’s always a woven tapestry of multiple strands. And so showing or revealing those links, those connections, those stars situated in connection with each other is what I’m seeking or trying to do.
There’s a reference, there’s a poem for Harriet Jacobs, which I love teaching. I was a high school English teacher and librarian, and there’s just so many figures or names people don’t know that they should be familiar with, or that I want to point to and reference or nudge to if the reader has that curiosity or is motivated to do so. Yeah, it’s back to just the librarian at heart in terms of like, it’s a collection, it’s a conversation, it’s a polyvocal experience, across space and time.
DC: Call and response is really great. I think that goes back to what you were saying, especially thinking about the black church, thinking about sermons, that sort of thing. A lot of the way that we relate to one another is through our reaction, our continual reactions, which is another reason why I sometimes find MFA readings to be so off-putting, as someone who like started in Slam, ‘cause like, if anyone’s been to a Slam before, those poets are gonna let you know if a poem is working or not during the poem, which I love. I love the engagement that we give to each other, the energy we give to the — or even an open mic, I won’t even say a slam.
If you go to an open mic that’s being run well, the people are giving energy to the person at the front of the room. It is a giving and receiving of energy. Which is sometimes why, when I go to an MFA reading and everyone’s really sitting there all polite, I’m like, “oh, there’s no energy in the room.”
Like, there’s nothing to give. Nothing to receive. I love going up and being like, “hi.” And then they’ll look at me and I’m like, “no, I work with kids. I need you to say hello back”. Like, I need you to know that your voice is still working in this room, like, breathe for me.
ACR: I tell students to think about reading as a type of publication. You are collecting or garnering feedback. It’s a testing ground. You are measuring or seeing how these words live in the air. For me, it’s equally as important as an actual physical publication.
Like, I think there’s a lot of value in terms of testing things on the air and seeing the way that they resonate. And I think in a vocal performance setting, you’re always hoping people are like, “Hmm.” Or there’s the clapping, or like an utterance or, but I always love, like, if you’re ever at a musical performance or even like a drag performance, when people make that stank face, like that look.
DC: Yeah. My dad’s a bass player, so yeah, the stink face is very much alive.
ACR: Yes, yes. I’m always reaching for the stank face where it’s just like, it’s just so funky.
DC: I want language that contorts me. You know what I mean? Like, I want language that I physically can’t sit there and not make a face.
DC: Something I was struck by as I went through this collection was the amount of instructions given concerning how certain poems should be read and engaged with, which I also appreciated. I was thinking about the bells, thinking about all the instructions for “Hymn of Inscape”. In the opening poem’s epigraph, it states:
All “reading” is performance. Some performance is “reading.”
There’s another epigraph in the book that says something similar.
All “writing” is performance. Some performance is “writing”
We could think of a poem’s textual representation as a translation of how it is performing on the page. How does your relationship to performance translate to how you wrote the poems down? Like, as you actually approach putting them onto the page?
I’m thinking specifically of “Hymn of Inscape,” which is a poem in the book that’s meant to be ripped out. It’s meant to be put in these envelope, like there’s a whole performance aspect to it. How did that translate into putting it into the collection for you?
ACR: I think with this book, I guess in contrast to my first book, I was like, how can I further… I got my MFA quite late in life after having a whole career in librarianship after already having a first book. I went to Brown, which is known to be a quite experimental program. I was in the steel yard in Providence making metal sculptural pieces. I was taking hieroglyphics, like, I always tried to trouble or be subversive or be outside of the, like, I just recently started writing sonnets after like, I’m like, I teach graduate and I’ve never written a sonnet before.
So for the book, I was like, there’s just so much, I think, inaccessibility that surrounds poetry. I’ve heard Van talk about it in terms of poems as secrets that middle schoolers are struggling to figure out, or the answer is this obscured, hidden thing that is inscrutable, and so I was like, I just want it to be playful. I want it to be an invitation to play, to literally deface the book, to literally cut things up. To read in your own manner in a way that delights and perhaps invites like, I don’t know, sitting there with scissors, like cutting up a book, which you’re not supposed to do, or tearing things up.
I just wanted it to be an experiment almost, like to make reading, not a one-directional thing where there’s a traditional way that I’m saying you have to read it, but to engage with it as an experimental act of reciprocity.
When I perform that piece, which I’ve done quite a few times now, audience members get up, they come, they do, they look in the…, like, it’s a way to also engage with this notion of, there’s a reading where I come, I stand at the front, at the podium, at the microphone. You sit in your chair. I read at you. Then you get up. There’s a way I want you to invite, come up to the front of the space as well. Look in the mirror and have to utter words, like I’m gonna read things in the order in which you’ve selected them or brought them to me. Like that, there’s a duality, or a give and take as it relates to the reading process, either on your own and/or in the event space or reading space.
It’s also very much in conversation, I feel like, [with] Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, [which] was the only other book I’ve seen that was inviting this level of intertextual play in a way that was really exciting.
I wanted to be wild and free and imaginative in terms of the experience even of having a physical book. Engaging with the book, like thoroughly engaging and thinking about what it means to read as expansively as possible.
DC: It’s making me think, how do we as poets make the audience or the reader a co-creator of meaning?
ACR: Precisely.
DC: I think poetry is a genre that’s full of questions, especially ‘cause after it leaves our hands, there’s so little we can actually dictate about how someone will take that work, how they’’’ll deal with the work, how they’ll read into the work. And so I love the way that this book invites us to take active ownership of making that meaning.
You have to decide, if I was the one cutting up the book — which I have not done yet ‘cause it looks so good — but if I was the one cutting up the book, I decide which words go with which tercets, which images go with which words. The audience then decides how that book, how that poem is created and all those good things.
And so I think there’s a really interesting thing about how we engage, and there’s a lot of really good notes in here thinking about form, and how form invites different kinds of readings.
I think the last question that I’ll ask you before we get to the end of this thing is… I’m thinking about this book’s use of images and hybrid texts, which I’ve mentioned before. We don’t see a whole lot of images and stuff in poems, at least not historically, that’s becoming more popular as people get more comfortable with hybrid work. But in a recent episode of this podcast, my friend Kay E. Bancroft described hybrid poetry as getting funky on the page.
I was wondering if that resonated with you, and then, what’s your own approach to hybrid texts?
ACR: Yeah. I love, as we talked about, the stank face. Yeah, definitely in conversation with getting funky. For me, I think, again, about the visual, like, visual art in relationship or contrast, like what we’ll be willing to do at a contemporary art museum in terms of standing in front of a piece of art we don’t understand.
Like, you’re able to still engage and have experience and sometimes we’re more open to that than we are in a poetry reading or going or understanding or trying to attempt poetry. And so I think, in terms of just a multidisciplinary practice, like, what it means to be operating on its many registers as possible in that way. I feel like, as adults, it’s trained out of you, or what it means to be sophisticated or highbrow or whatever is books no longer have images, or we have this weird dichotomy in terms of like downplaying graphic novels or comic books or anime, and I just don’t believe that exists. I do feel like there’s pleasure in having visual images alongside written word, text.
It goes back to a type of childlike wonder in terms of picture books being often our first experience with literacy. And the Bible and Dante’s Inferno also, like, often text or prepared or experienced alongside visual images.
And so that was really important to me. I’m also just kind of like an archival geek. And like, some of the images are just like ones that are forgotten or wouldn’t be engaged with or looked at in any sense otherwise. And so resuscitating them and re-contextualizing them was important to me. I did a reading in New York and one of the other readers picked up the book and was like, “oh, there’s pictures!”
It’s just an unexpected, again, a delight or treat or like something to add another layer of meaning or possibility.
DC: Thank you so much for this collection. Truly, it was a joy to read, it is definitely a delight. If that’s what you were aiming for, it’s what I got from it. It’s a delight to engage with, and I think it made me think deeper. And I don’t say that lightly. The presence of such a wealth of different kinds of engagement made me want to engage with it more. I think the first time I read it, I felt empowered to not get everything the first time.
Because I’m definitely a spin-the-block kind of listener to music, spin-the-block kind of reader, like, let me do it again. Let me get to it again, and I promise things will come through to me, because the first time I just gotta get used to it. I gotta look at it and go, “okay, this is what’s going on. Got my lay of the land.” And so especially as I went through reading it again in preparation for this interview, I was really like, now that I know what’s going on in here, now that I know what I’ve gotten myself into, it’s like, wow, there’s so much careful attention that’s been given.
And I really love that kind of attention and seeing what kind of attention I can give the things that interest me. Because that’s really what it is, at the end of the day. It’s very clear you have a passion for this kind of engagement for the things that you’re working with. And it reminds me that I can engage with the stuff that I love in that same way. So thank you so much. I appreciate it. It’s been a wonderful conversation and I would love it if you could close us out by reading one of your eponymous poems.
ACR: Sure.
Black Bell [Wore the whistles…]
A bell’s dome represents the whole universe, the flat bottom represents the earth, and the hollow inside represents the space between the rest of the universe and the earth. When you strike a bell it sends a message from Earth out into the universe. Before reading, strike a bell tuned to A, the note connected to the third-eye chakra.
Wore the whistles of men down her back. Her clapper hung like a saggy breast, a piece of music. Beneath her skirt was the truth made ugly. Unsweet as blackberry thorns. Her laughter’s rattle, a mask for secret contempt. She took in as much as she could. A homely, or rather timely, air about her. Inside the wall of her cheek was a sliver of violence only she could trust. The wind would witness but wouldn’t chime in.
From Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins, published by Copper Canyon. Copyright © 2024 by Alison C. Rollins. Originally published in Poets.org. Used with permission of the author.
DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a series of the O, Word? podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. The music for eponymous and o word is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Until next time — thanks for listening.
