Bell
Lucky when my shift on deck aligned with early
light and I could polish the bell: waist
and shoulder, head and lip.
I’d toggle open
the gear locker, grab the tin of Nevr-Dull stuffed
with redolent wadding, rip off a chunk and begin
to rub away the night’s tarnish.
That summer
I also came to know the burnishment of met desire,
of a body’s shine against another body like first
light glinting on polished brass.
Once, softly,
I tugged the bell’s forbidden pull (superstition!),
touched
clapper
to mouth.
Long-waiting sound rang
into the hull of my ear.
A Mouth Like a Sailor
You hawse-dog. You chock
block & scupper plug. Bollard.
You’re a pintle in my gudgeon.
Davit swinger. Your binnacle’s
deviant & your hatch is not
tight. Into the laz, lubber line.
You’re a hard chine. Wrong-
reeved. A knot’s in your bight
& your hawser won’t haul. Skivvy
waver. You’re afterbrow
& your thruster’s got
no dig. Stick a fid in your splice.
You wouldn’t know fancywork
if it hit you with a French
whip. Deadeye. Seacock.
Limber hole. Kedge it
& the capstan you came in on.
You’ll never come about. You’ll
never make way with me. I’m not
your waypoint, not
your following sea.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s seven books include Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry, Toward Antarctica, and the co-created Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award and a ForeWord Indies Gold Medal. Editor-in-chief of Broadsided and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Liz teaches at Brandeis University and works as a naturalist and field assistant on Cape Cod. In August, 2025, Persea Books will publish her newest poetry collection, SOFAR, which includes poems that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, Orion, and these two, now at Terrain.org.
Read prose and poetry by Elizabeth Bradfield in Terrain.org: “Letter to America,” “Toward Antarctica: Haibun + Photographs,” and “Words + Art on the Streets, Stalls, Walls… and Buses.”
