Lana Bella – Four Poems


 

Erstwhile

You are narrow as a church spire
when everyone else pools silvers in
their leather purse, toting goods
like water from a well. Until frost
slices through your fabric chamber,
you move to dress in shabby chain-
mail of bones too fragile to traverse
under the weight of prayers’ beads.
Swindling vermilion to construct ink,
fingers outline chestnut horses on
carousel; lips opine of some opulent
youth spumed in blizzard of lullabies;
voltaic eyes scaled fractal brilliance
of taffeta-veiled sanctuary beyond
the sentinels of skid-row, varnished
and enthused by the diamond glint
of the moon. Then the palms of your
hands flutter pale over the lunette
bay, puddling as hot tears on snow-
flakes, there, you sit ached in hunger
that fish through pockets for coins.



I Dreamed Where The Blue Siloed

I walked where the nocturnal sun pulsed
timpani stress of the blues
echoing across the abandoned road.
How the winter cape fluttering
sea color from me in the manner
of hyacinth wedded to spring earth,
tabbed by chrome skeins of music.
Before I knew how to run, I walked,
I walked riverways, mud-clung shores;
an architect of rust-inert
and stern throwing shades nestled
from which everything hissed
beneath my jubilant feet.
Midnight warped where pockets
of white showed, moonlight squatted
doe-eyed, tucking the air around
the bed of lavender heads,
until I reached back into another time,
running, in a calico dress,
toward the prairie field of honeylocust blue.



Ephemeral

there is an old memory,
vacant as a lazy sloth, erstwhile
and ephemeral, that skins the adagio’s
eiderdown, swirls the cleft-lipped flowers
specked with August’s stillborn moon—

there is fragile strength where
chisel-tongue meets Merlot red, where
nightingale’s song curls smooth like vellum,
where petal-lips whets velvet-fine to ribs
of your vintage silk and desert rain—

there is a feel of honeycomb cotton
on your pinned-up dress, quiet and pleating,
like a hollowed-through murmur at the spell of
torrid adoration, red and feathered,
as you gaze into a kind of dream of sky-
gleamed smoke, tethered to trees—



The Half-Ghost

just ahead a follicle of light,
she turns with a whisper
more than waist high, slim
fingers take hold of tensile
double doors, pale skin wrings
its hue through concrete slat—

invisible between dew settling
and erstwhile muscularity of
clouds, she dissipates into
the atmosphere like an ethos,
tracing tendrilled smoke on
memory’s hollow pendant—


 

Author’s Statement on Beauty

Beauty is getting out of bed every morning in a sun-speckled house smells of bacon, coffee that laces with whisky and a social strategy around my laptop that fends off a fur-shedding dog, busy-fingered children and a wryly pragmatic husband.


Lana Bella is an author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming) and has had poetry and fiction featured in 2River, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and San Pedro River Review, among others. She resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.