Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers,
The world is full of words, with more added each moment: we pore over them on pages, and peck them into screens, whisper them into ears, or string them into song. Yet so often the real story, the truest, gets told by what is left out. In this issue of Belletrist we collected the unsaid, unwritten, unheard. Words typed, erased, rewritten, and left unsent. Words caught in the throat. Their ghosts haunt these tightly tied pages. We invite you to let them out.
The Editors
News!
Bellezine 2025: The Multilingual Issue Available On Campus
Bellezine 2025 is now available–free to all students, faculty, staff, and alumni–on campus in the Library Media Center and...
March 2021
/ Identities and Locations
Throwing Up Fear
He was referring to my stage fright, which had caused me to puke up the contents of my stomach before every single performance.
Up the Mountain
I could not wait to go home and eat something good, but I also wanted to go on more trips, to see something I had not seen before, to be able to feel the thrill in the pit of my stomach as my world view changed.
A Coffee Shop
Unassuming. Generic. The coffee shop is just like the many scattered about the city. Virtually indistinguishable in its normalcy.
July 2020
Pandemic Day 3, At the Restaurant
spiders that have crept back
into the wine room corners. I like to
leave them, to
leave something alive
Pandemic Day 15 and 16, Dead Yeast
I kill the yeast. Everything is
hot water these days
Pandemic Day 28, Dad Eats Leftovers
to want to taste something
she cooked, and she,
still there in the freezer, her
script: Chicken Soup
April 2020
/ Climate Justice Issue
Pearl River 1980
I remember when I came to visit for the Spring Festival, all those strangers around us, dancing and suffocating me with their sweltering bodies, and the subsequent fever that lasted into my final day.
The Earth Spit Us Out
The last time we set foot on land was over two years ago. How odd that we are floating slowly towards the Port of Los Angeles. It took us four days from when we first saw the mountains of shipping containers to be close enough to shore to get there by dingy.
The Turtle Swam Away
“What’s in the sky? Why do you keep looking at it?” “I’m searching for answers.” His voice is deeper than I expected. “Answers for what?” “If the rain is ever going to stop. If the world is going to end.”
March 2020
Negotiating My Survival After The Zombie Apocalypse
What can you do?
asks the man wearing a flak jacket,
guessing already I am as useful as a
split lip.
How to Write Poems About Your Family:
Mine trauma like coal.
Barbaric: A Tour
In the novelty museum, a woman and her son browse
instruments of torture.
February 2020
Forecast
More goddamn rain.
Payday
a bowl lowers down twinkling with popcorn balls, lacquer candy apples, Bazooka gum wrapped in comics, neon-yellow smiley stickers or the motherlode: full-sized Clark bars
Perennialism
“Put everything on it,” I said. “I want the greenest lawn in all the world. I want people to look at it and think Helen lives here.”
December 2019 – Pushcart Nominations
History From the Print
“Relax,” the tech urges. “This will take about an hour. You won’t feel much, maybe a slight buzzing sensation. The procedure is perfectly harmless, but it may temporarily stir up some memories.”
Anonymous Letter Written to a Boston Newspaper by a Lowell Factory Girl From the Print
The speed was raised just as we could bear it, and often, almost always, at our request, because with the increase of speed our pay increased.
The Mineral Pools at Oxley From the Print
Hardly the “glow mantling” promised. In every respect, the most disgusting pool imaginable.
December 2019 – Pushcart Nominations
Your Dad Dies / I Google Atom Bombs From the Print
Today, girls and boys soak sugar sacks in gasoline, light and glide them up over the wall, hoping to land their kite bombs in their enemy’s future
grain fields.
The Survival Book From the Print
The honeycomb is perfect for learning math. “Exact hexagons,” it says. I like that word. It’s a word my mother would have liked, too—she was a word person.
Graveyard Shift From the Print
Nanveet was certain the new girl had been drinking a couple of Cokes every morning and throwing the cans into the wooded patch behind the service station. Who drinks Coke at seven thirty in the morning, he thought. How can a person do that?
September 2019
Great Little Death Wish Thing
We wish, just a bit, for the curve in the mountain highway
Shame
I lived beyond life and the sick, beyond ruin, hung from charred trees. I felt the ghost of otherworldliness.
Summer at the Range
we get sunburned. we get tan. we read book after book
July 2019
The Minotaur Visits His Mother
I’m in the maze again,
playing what I thought was a
game
My Son is Trying to Forget Himself
I have loved him all his life,
dedicated myself to the act itself
The Second Coming
The only thing missing was Jesus himself—not the one in the tabernacle, but the actual guy, who they all said was coming back and would be one of us; maybe even me, Jimmy would sometimes think.
June 2019 – from Bellezine
Honey Rivas Smokes Cigarillos
Honey Rivas smokes cigarillos delicate
burning olive branches
living in her bruised hands dying
in her angry lungs
Seaweed
endless gulping glugging bubbling tug
swallows the ocean into its maw
Wrinkles
I’m afraid of the fleetingness of my skin’s elasticity.
Every day begins with a dollop of sunscreen
April 2019
Last Day of the Viaduct / Linda Waterfall Is Dead
have you ever fallen asleep on it
can you even imagine no ulterior
have you been declared unsafe
only music and love
have you planned to drive around it
singing a cadenza
Probabilities
the empty road ahead—
no gas stations, no rest stops,
not even a phone booth to call for help.
Ars Longa
Even with cancer the dog
has to be fed and the trash
has to be bundled
March 2019
The Rural Chronicles : Junctures
But I keep looking for the core world, a deeper place, that bright bell of sun. We’re not Presbyterian school girls, after all; we’re in the middle of a wake-up call.
Ubh
I’m struck dumb suddenly by this egg, this enormity.
This immense incomprehensible oval and its lovely silence.
Basil Leaves
this is our home she says, skin and bones built up with love
we put basil on everything