Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Early Star
The river held it still
or stiller than hurtling through,
held it in bluer blue
than water, jostled its shape
with lazy waves. It stopped me,
on the ridge, and so you too:
made home on how many
shivering planes, lapped
into oblong, doubled in sparkle,
utterly ungravitied,
by water clear but steeped
with bitter unknowns
that touch only everything close. You slapped
mosquitoes, headed us toward the house.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell reads “Early Star”
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, forthcoming from Waywiser Books in 2026; Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize; and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New writing appears in the Georgia Review, the Sewanee Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, and the Southern Review. Bell teaches at UNC Wilmington and is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River. annalenaphillipsbell.net