Our Small Pets

We threw dead hermit crabs in the street.
When the bodies crunched, we plugged our eyes.
So we might see reflections
we filmed ourselves. We dug up the roots of trees
and called them bones of buried saints.
We snuck feral cats through the back door
and hid them in the bathtub.
Dressed in faux fur, we stuck gum to the ceiling.
We snagged our eyelids with the hook of a hanger.
We held funerals for snails.
So we might be singers, we recorded our voices.
We picked flimsy locks with bobby pins.
We named our goldfish Chaos. It lived for a hundred years.
We guzzled gallons of pink lemonade over crushed ice.
On the side of a gravel road, we ran barefoot for a mile.
We dreamt about a bag stuffed with meats and bones.
We wept when we stole a tube of chap stick.
We feared our bodies were two-dimensional.
We ripped out our eyebrows.
We buried fish in water-filled yogurt containers
so their gills, even in death, would be wet with breath.

Bridget Bell is an Ohio-born poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She studied French and journalism at Ohio University and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in The New Ohio Review, Folio, The Blood Orange Review, SUB-LIT, and The Chaffey Review, among other publications. She tends bar in Manhattan and works as an editorial assistant/publicist for the independent literary press, Four Way Books.