“Who (In the Underbelly of a Day on Grass Hill)" and What Sex Does
"And Dreaming," 2015, oil on canvas Jennifer Packer Many poems have considered the experience of the female sexual role, but Bella Lobue’s poem, “Who (In the Underbelly of a Day on Grass Hill,)” (Published in Glass , August 27th, 2025) is different. Mysteriously big and subversive. In it we see sex as a producer of artifice and distance. We see our body respond to the movements of nature as well as sexual movement. By the pairing of these movements, the way we organize bodily experience is challenged. The stage directions of sex are there: we take our shirt off at the beginning and at the end, the partner climaxes and we roll over. But it is not erotic. These bookend sexual gestures are a skeleton to be filled out by images that get far away from sex. They pull on nature: a cat eating a mouse, a bee sting, pebbles denting our hands. Those muscles hang strangely on the poem's frame, They point us towards one of the poem's patterns: a movement and then a response of ...