Lana Faith Call – Four Poems

frak|tur

in museums,
we debated the
impermanence of
architecture, the mercy of
surrendering, the life-pulse
of everything. It was Valentine
rings or dragonfly frakturs. Going
dutch, I learned how to hold my
chopsticks like royalty, and
you couldn’t help but take
the long way around,
Adrift in a sea of
white.
and so (untethered)
we came to rest where
we started.

A Word Like Wire

In your communion in the dark
My words might spin away like sparks
Or skitter off like swarms of silent fireflies.
They might fall like endless rain
Upon a vast and empty space
And fill not one minute iota of your time

And though I captain brave battalions
Of nouns like “Psyche” and “Pygmalion”
And I know a hundred ways to rhyme with “mirth”
There is a word which tastes like wire
Scalding hot and seared in fire
Yet I hunger for it more than all the earth

It’s ocean-blue and yet vermilion
Glimmers gold like several billion
Suns together in a rhapsody of dance
And if i ever find the courage
I will step gladly to that furnace
And lay dying in an ecstasy of chance.

Stars (through the whiskey-grey

Stars (through the whiskey-grey
muddied haze of memory, once
seemed indistinct and unfinished;
whirling, careening balls of
potentiality, parading in an
endless causal pas de deux with that
funny old man Effect, stretched
tight across the carcass-skin of eternity;
far-flung freckles smattered upon
the face of God —
but now,
when I turn my eyes toward the
heavens, all I see are) stars.

Last Light

I do this not to mourn you;
You were never worth the tears.
I do this not for comfort;
Loss and lassitude are pairs
Of equal-tempered lovers
Nested deep within each other—
Folded one inside another
Like twin origami prayers.

The ring, I left in Lincoln
(I was never yours to wound)
Upon a glasstop table
Near the Goodwill lost and found
‘Cause I could never hide you,
Curl confessions up inside you,
Camouflage my every smile
In a crooked little frown.

So in this field of heather,
As our day draws to a close,
I find it finished simply;
Nothing brash or grandiose.
Just a humble ray of sun that
Lingers once and now is done, it
Ended just as we begun it,
In this place I loved you most.

Lana Faith Call is a trans writer who lives near Seattle. She has red hair and blue eyes. The rest changes without notice. This is her first international publication.