206
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2019 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY ANNA LENA PHILLIPS BELL
At Carolina Beach Over the rail, after supper, they gleam, so we step down stairs to the night-dark sand to look at the fireworks, dandelions, starbursts, shattered between the pier and beach and one more thing we’re bound to look at: the moon – huge, orange, emerging from clouds over ocean, over two girls by the shore doing handstands. “Look at the fireworks!” A grown-up nearby cannot condone any not looking at what they’d all planned to look at. “The moon, though,” says one girl, closer to wave and to sheen – impossible not, when it’s one made of blood, to look at. The fireworks
ANNA LENA PHILLIPS BELL is the author of Ornament (University of North Texas Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared in A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (University of Georgia Press, 2019) and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). She is the 2019–2021 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for Eastern North Carolina. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington, where she is the editor of Ecotone and the magazine’s sister imprint, Lookout Books.