Bellingham Review Archives
Why do you pretend to be stone, wind, bird? – A. AJMÁTOVA ONE STANDS STILL while another takes flight, each according to their nature, I understand stones and birds. Even the elusive owl. If I grew a stem, roots, leaves if I sunk in the water, without breathing but without dying if I were born …
Form, fragments, and new motherhood in Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra These days pour out like water through a sieve and This is how many of my sentences end these days: interrupted, still searching for the closure of punctuation. My journal and the Notes app on my phone are littered with fragments like this. Some days …
Body, I want to be polite and remember the quaint concepts: modesty, womanhood, prayer. I know these old phylogenies of shame. You still feel them, something I refuse to acknowledge. I think this split between us happened in a bed in Austin: I slept naked for the first time. The rented Kirkland sheets, come undone, …
Winner of the 2023 Tobias Wolff Award It was the eighties and we didn’t know better. We microwaved leftovers in plastic containers, pressing our faces against the radiating glass door, watching our meal spin glamorous circles beneath a warm amber glow. We ate hot dogs cold, straight from the package. We sprayed cheese from a …
Benjamin Bellas currently lives in Miami, Florida. His work is forthcoming or has been featured in Hunger Mountain, Jet Fuel Review, The Broadkill Review, The Pinch, Fives (A Companion to Denver Quarterly), Qu Literary Magazine, Cadillac Cicatrix, and Drain Magazine, amongst others.
Sir Francis Drake great great ringing of alarm bells firing of cannons a singed odor in the courtyard of English attack dogs as they came the windows of shameful tortures red-hot irons merchant of terror the business of pirates that hidden village with so lucrative a fortune mad ideas over three hundred years of that …
from “وطن Vatan,” Parissa Rad Dear Readers, Thank you so much for being here to read this new issue of Bellingham Review. This has required so much hard work and dedication from the team, but it’s also been a blast to help put together this incredible issue full of top-tier stories, essays, art, and poems. …
“وطن Vatan” Medium: Paintings are gouache on paper; the teapot is stoneware, glaze, gold luster, hung with fishing line. “Vatan” translates to “homeland.” Artist Statement: Nostalgic memories of growing up Iranian and both the utilitarian and decorative artforms that originate from Iran inspire me deeply. The rich detail and color palettes of Persian Miniature art, …
As you talk, it seems that a lily strolling in your voice Talk to me I want to hear you You were the gardener of your voice And your laughter a flock of white doves that fly at once I love you like adhan at dawn like the road that leads to sleep I love …
Marianne von Willemer to Goethe, circa 1816 I sent one to you while you were at work— as if an artichoke could make a wife of me—a thistle for your fork, Cynara cardunculus, after a quick dip in olive oil and lemon. “Poison,” you once wrote, was not some Secret Thief, but “the intensity of …