Bells
- Feb 1, 2019
- 1 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
by Ben Westlie
The church chimes. The bells singing out a language older than I’ll ever be. I’m sitting in the pew, singing hymns, getting closer to immortality.
After my father died when I was a teenager I started having sex with men. I was allowed to.
We were nineteen and a shower of meteors was bombarding Earth’s atmosphere. All the streaks like tinsel tying the world in a cosmic knot. Lacing the stars. What a majestic trap.
You told me to never worry—worry is what people
wear when they’re not real people.
Your mischievous smirk so unnatural Like a magician about to levitate a body—a sort of deity to assure my longings for a man were celestial.
I watched the sky toss meteors. I wished for all clocks to stop moving their hands. For the dead to be blind to the living.
Ben Westlie currently holds a MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four chapbooks all published by Finishing Line Press, most recently Under Your Influence. His work has appeared in the anthology Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, selected and edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, and in the journals The Fourth River, Third Coast, The Talking Stick, Atlas and Alice, The Battered Suitcase, and forthcoming in the tiny journal.
