In God’s Bell Tower
My Lee-Enfield and I are perched above a town’s square.
Below, the European yews and beech are choked out by ash, the Belgian cobblestones wrenched from their mortar.
A town torpefied by tanks and airstrikes.
I lay high up, my eye in a scope, waiting for an unprotected scalp.
I lay under a bronze bell, engraved with the name of a saint.
I lay in between a house of God and Heaven, a cathedral and a boundless sky.
Only three bullets left, though plenty of empty casings. I strung them together with twine, crafting a shiny rosary knotted by guilt. I wrap my wrists with it and press my palms against themselves
–praying for my soul.
I pray for theirs as well.
I hear someone climbing up the bell tower’s ladder; I panic struggling to untangle my hands from the rosary.
I am unarmed and preparing for death when…a nun opens the trap door. The convent abandoned this cathedral many months ago.
She wears a white veil, and her eyes do not reflect the times—the color of a bluebird’s belly. She’s about as young as I when a uniform was buttoned onto my boyish body. She does not address me, her round chin angles towards the tower’s opening.
She heaves herself up, and the place is doused with distant noise of chatting and sputtering car engines. I hear a town alive. She warms the space with her presence. I hear pumping in her ribs, short breaths from her lips.
She sets down a vase of mums and marigolds. She does not even look at me. I try to speak but I have no air in my lungs, unable to expel any sound. I am not breathing. She is not from my time.
How long have I been here? Has God forgotten me?
I was never able to use those last bullets.
Vivian Hall is a sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, pursuing an English degree with a specialization in creative writing. Her poetry has been featured in the Looking Glass and received a silver medal from the Michigan Council for the Social Studies. Furthermore, it is heavily influenced by women and femininity; many of her poems can be considered feminist poetry, but she is not limited to that genre.
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