Still Life, Idaho Falls, Idaho
by Francesca Bell
I want to walk into Shakey’s Pizza,
1975, with my sister who tells me
what to do and my brother who plays
Army with me, a boy so gentle
he has no choice but to obsess himself
with weapons. I am so skinny
my bones show through my clothes,
so shy I look down in all the photographs.
I want the scent of the pizzas
as they bake, to know one
is intended for us, a goodness
the exact shape and size
of our hunger, and our hunger
growling inside us, a sensation
we can still understand.
Nothing has fallen apart yet.
We live in the little house
on Woodruff in the little town
full of Mormons and physicists
and wind so cold and constant
the icicles freeze sideways.
The three of us have tunneled
all day through snow piled
and drifted in our yard.
I want to warm up in Shakey’s Pizza
and wait to be fed the way we wait
for the future, thinking it will arrive
as ordered, and we will eat as much as we want.
After, our parents, faces unmarked
by what is coming, will give us
each a nickel, and we’ll line up
behind the other children
at the Soft Serve machine
and attempt to make our own desserts.
The ice cream is smooth and sweet,
and we do not yet know
we’ll never master it.
No matter how many times
we are allowed to try,
it will slide and slide and never look
as we imagine. It will pile,
misshapen and precarious,
in our cones.
Excerpt from our conversation with Francesca Bell:
KARAN
I love “Still Life, Idaho Falls, Idaho.” Three kids at Shakey’s Pizza in 1975, waiting to be fed the way they wait for the future, and then the Soft Serve machine: “and we do not yet know / we’ll never master it.” A year later Elizabeth Bishop published “One Art” and assured us the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Your kids at the ice cream machine might have a word with her. Tell us about your relationship with the past. Do you go back to Idaho Falls often, in poems or otherwise?
FRANCESCA
I lived in Idaho Falls from age six to age ten, the four best years of my childhood. It was a small town, truly full of Mormons (because of its proximity to Utah) and physicists (because of the Idaho National Laboratory, home to numerous nuclear reactors), and astonishingly cold. My dad had stable employment there, our schools were the best schools we ever attended, and the problems that would later engulf us were just beginning to bubble beneath the surface. I’ve only been back there once, and this is the first poem I’ve written about it. Partly because of my age (59), I imagine, and partly because a young member of my family has come close in recent years to dying of alcoholism, I have been revisiting this particular part of my past a lot, looking at the befores and afters. I’ve avoided writing much about the difficult parts of my childhood, honestly, have tried to keep keeping the silence we were quietly taught to keep. But it’s gotten harder to do, especially since my mother died. Something more general that I will say about the past is that there are people and experiences that only make sense to me as I get older, as I get further from them. It is counterintuitive, I think, that I feel I can now know people better after enormous absence, that I see them more clearly the longer it’s been since I last saw them. But it is true.
"Nothing has fallen apart yet." This line is the black hole of the poem. Really good stuff. I'd like to read more from Idaho Falls.
Such quiet ominousness in this.