Honeysuckle
For scant weeks in spring when the ground has had time to get warmer,
and all the white flowers whose forms are so hard to imagine
are coming to bloom, and the air smells each day of some newness,
a sweetness whose name, like the scent, flags the tip of the tongue
then leaves, leads me onward, leads bees on, leads moths, leads small flies
(for who knows which beast every flower is meant to attract
and who can collect each one’s name?), I breathe in as much of
the air as will flow through my lungs before—sudden, persistent—
you lower down over the piedmont, imparting a one-noted
sweetness that has to content us all summer, for only
a rare other fragrance can cut through those curtains of sugar.
First published in Ornament (University of North Texas Press, 2017).
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, from Waywiser Books. She is also the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Her work appears in journals including the Southern Review, Orion, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and the Oxford American. The recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature and the Winter Anthology Award, she has served as editor of Ecotone since 2013. She is an associate professor in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in what’s now called North Carolina and beyond. Learn more about her at https://annalenaphillipsbell.net/About
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