Pilgrim Bell: Poems

I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows.

Wrath is the desire to repay what you've suffered.

Every person I’ve ever met. Has been small enough. To fit. In my eye.

It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds.

The reward for goodness is just more goodness and sometimes not even that.

At his elementary school in an American suburb, a boy's shirt says: "We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!

On first inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips. Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips, crawls through his throat, through his guts to nally emerge out his anus. He’s all hollow! the devil giggles. He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long desperation to be fi lled.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.