Lana Bella – Three Poems


 

Idiopathic

Sleep forces your eyes open, wearing 
visit on bony wits. An exile though 
home, you give limbs to shadows, only 
to put fingers to violin; lately asea
notes breaking. Somewhere high where
the air rustles in the chimney flue, 
writhing scales talk around autumn
and black flies, calling, calling, longing
to slurp at draperies, then up your
silk before puddling a mess of pale on 
the floorboards. Pulling wiry shape
to earth, you call nimbly to braiding
through wound then long loves, slight
fingers to fall and wing your tiny bones.


 

Revenant

The walls contracted; midnight spread
over teak like a cloak of ink. The girl
puffed on ruches of Gauloises, brilliantly
lit until the boning pinks of haze cast
her like a slip, a slow crawl of melancholy
mooring on breaths and glow. She was
still, sometimes, busy only with dry flails
of heat slithering through space, cut 
away to guttering her with its heath at 
the throat. Up the air’s long, serpent way,
she breathed slenderness of sleep bent
on memory, suggesting to the bounce in
limbs licking the thicket, as revenants
felt sought in her smoked, shared dark.


 

Flight Collected Into A Field Of Alfalfa

Flight like memory, perfect, slender, 
breaking across a field of alfalfa 
seeking water to sleep in. The sheer 
fall, skied into their veins, peeling
her from howls of wrens and fingers 
of trees where she blinked up like
a diorama of a city she never knew.
This world ended her with plumes
and a puddle of harlot red on the wet, 
hillocks chewed from the nails, nods
pulled like half-roads protracted.
Writhing in the plenitude of languor
that grew blurry, she ever softly
moved with the earth in tendons and
vibrations of bones, as shale pitted
up trenching assure the pale fingers,
sloped petaling the scrim of water. 


 

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 three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016), has had poetry and fiction featured in Comstock Review, EVENT, Notre Dame Review, Rock and Sling, & The Lampeter Review, among others, and work to appear in Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. 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.