J. Bell Price

Writer | Poet | Diet coke drinker | You can find me at: http://joanjbell.com | https://bio.site/joanjbell

[smakkabagms]

“And this is how a whole life unfolds - in minutes too painful and rich for you to bear them.”

— Joanna Klink, Nightfields

[fille--de--joies]

(im)Maturity

She brushes her hair, untangles knots soaked in waits that sting her eyes.

Age plows her furrows — those folds she insets with cubic comets and scraps of letters macerated in saltwater; sour remnants of flavors weathered by time.

Because the sea always prevails over the froth, frail, constant, steadfast, still lying along the porous frontiers of the heart.

She untangles the entrails of dawn. The last snarls englut the sky, graze on silver linings, and spit the remaining stars into funnels that contort like ventricles.

At the final quenching weaning her wings she deploys her chest over the wind's embrace. On her breasts, it paints the paleness of nights spent celebrating slumber.

✒️ F. J.

[firstfullmoon]

Leila Chatti, from “The Moment When A Feeling Enters,” in Wildness Before Something Sublime

[text ID: I go on living. Deathtouched, changed, but my life arrives again / at yet. It’s May. I wake to it, thick and sweet as honey I’d forgotten.]

[havingapoemwithyou]

Pear Tree by Victoria Chang

[lunchboxpoems]

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

[sahashbelvanie]

🦞 Clawed Witness 🌬️

Only I remain. The land and ocean to myself. The seaward marsh— The salted mud of the shore, where pygmy things once scuttled and tunneled. The reeds, where buzzing, flying things once rested.

Gray sand, littered with hollowed homes—an oak eaten by water. It’s a great stretch of land, Plain as far as the eye can see.

Pale gray clouds, echoing, rush overhead. A storm will come soon, To whisk away the rotting bridge, One piece after another. The fishing boats now lie in indiscernible wreck. The old seaside villages, too, will follow.

Here I am. Here I remain, Back arched to the sky, Bracing for rain. Only I can cherish this beach— For that is the nature of my kind.

[musingsofadiva]

[lunchboxpoems]

JANE HIRSHFIELD

[havingapoemwithyou]

Eurydice by Jenny George

[havingapoemwithyou]

Postscript by Marie Howe

[acklum]

Gravitas

She carries Gods the way I carry doubts heavy and close to my heart.

We both believe we'll die on the day they leave these bodies free to be light.

-acklum

[lunchboxpoems]

JAMES A. PEARSON

[havingapoemwithyou]

Worm Moon by Mary Oliver

[prophetic-memory]

Mary Oliver, "Morning Poem"

[quaintobsessions]

Brigid’s Forge

The light changes at a liminal hour in another time zone.

Brigid, goddess with a healer's face, watches from her mural over sparse traffic

as a woman crosses, her bare hands stained purple.

If you savoured me like a ripe fruit –

a blackberry, fresh-picked from among protective thorns –

the aftertaste would alter your voice

the way brambles change the mountainside;

the way crude metal is changed by flame.

Something shifts when you think in one another’s phrases.

Shared tongue, shared rhythms, shared care –

before dawn, vivid colour

trickles, like a tart burst of juice, into your greyscale dream –

and I walk on, hypnotised by the light in Brigid’s eyes.

[brotherorpheus]

December 19th, 2025

that year, december

came in a breath, long held

and slowly released, a calming sigh

which blooms white across

a window and vanishes

the nastic movement

of some flowering ghost

christmas lights painted

luminous abstractions,

birthing nebulae, across your eyes

as your eyes paint murals,

dynamic shades and dramatic shadows,

upon the growing vagueness

of humble memory

you fell asleep, ear to my chest, us both

swept along a heart-rhythm

and the music only echoes

as if from another room, and i only

hear you breathing

and i am nothing but a timbre

lost within your waveforms

the quiet sounds of you maybe dreaming

until i woke you for bed

i think that happened and

i think i live there still

[dustseeker]

I stand corrected in the mirror

in the bathroom after midnight.

This darkness bruises easily.

I will protect it from the hatred

of a rushed dawn. Today's last text:

'After all, you are my brother.'

The ocean seeps out of the faucet

and into the sink. Come dawn, I will

call the plumber and ask about

the secret ways of water and regret.