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Virginia
Bell WHAT HOLDS CONSTANT 9/1/09 I’ll tell you a story: it’s 1971,
a sixteen year old girl boards a greyhound in New Jersey
to get across the state line and into Philadelphia where
something tiny will be taken from her body. All of this will have happened by the time she opens the screen door to the
smell of tomatoes, a ready knife in her mother’s hand. But tonight it is 2009 and I am reading to my son: we
learn that a robot is simply a machine with a
computer inside it and may mimic the form and
function of a beetle or an ant. One day soon, scientists will make a robot so small it can hide inside a pill
and we will give each other these pills to swallow. Once inside, the robots will peck their way out with tooled limbs and set about to fix us. My son already knows this to be
true: when pavement licks the skin, a team of
microscopic craftsmen with pouches at the hip journey
quickly to the site, pour blood like mixed concrete,
tack down cells like tiles, then scuba away into the body’s many damp tunnels. The sixteen year old girl
remembers the loose metal latch on the door to the toilet at the back of the bus. Things came out where things had
gone in--and it was worth it. This desire to crawl in, or to be crawled into, holds constant. This insistence on seeping out, too, or being shoved. Oxygen in its relation to hydrogen. Virginia
Bell’s poetry has appeared in A Writers’ Congress: Chicago
Poets on Barack Obama’s
Inauguration, Ekphrasis, Woman Made Gallery’s Her Mark 2009,
Contrary Magazine,
Beltway Poetry Quarterly
and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. After
teaching part-time in the English Department at Georgetown
University for ten years, she moved to Evanston, IL in 2007, where she is
now an associate editor with RHINO Magazine and an adjunct professor
at Loyola University Chicago.
She has also published scholarly articles on activist writers such as Rosario Castellanos,
Eduardo Galeano,
and Leslie Marmon Silko,
and pedagogical material such as The
Instructor’s Resource Manual for Beyond Borders: A
Cultural Reader (Houghton Mifflin 2003). |
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