NOW SILENTLY AS
December sun appears a mile up
the hill, jerking its long, thin chain
like a penance. The fourth-pint
weight of you husks into center of
bones, too slender in the treachery
of snow casting threads to wind.
Much about egrets dragging from
dust storm and ocean, shrug off
sorrows on the hunt for briars and
food, setting you adrift through
the nest of all that remains. Beard
coarse on chin, you look to offering
of fields sere in their austere lines,
where the frozen air knows the land
it brings misery that sieves down
the throat of a starving man. Until
you trail the coterie of spoils enough
to unsettle the lives beside your
own, you hunger the salt of deeper
waters shuffling stones, for soon so
far away you’ll like to settle to some-
where else quietly, give praise to
the ground that gives nothing back.
SOMEONE RUNNING INTO A SUNSET
Palm roughs for the flick of a coin,
you are an open-hand rattler
hollowing out the air’s stiff grains.
Moving autumn with your wake,
you walk roads of names you long
to remember, curving at the places to
go back, ghosting lambent beneath
smoky hills. Big sky knocks birds
from the trees as if the aches in you
explode out the woolen stiff of
your hand; fingers pass lonely from
tipsy sloshes of a cup, yet holding
back the thirst that will bitter through
the bone and bloat. Shelter ghosts
on sturdy spine, you run to the soft
gray edge some miles out, hold onto to
ohms of someone else’s nocturnes,
running away, running towards
the well-lit dim of you running into
a sunset, sucked for air like a locked
click, your flight in the instant’s damp.
AUTUMN RIVER WRIST
By compass rose, the tiny girl
tread daffodils on sloe stones,
touched careful of wrist to river,
loosening a cocoon’s seams of
autumn. It was different from
before, this turning, self giving
to coves and lakes, in the soil of
her hands. Fingers planted seeds
on night as such, tender pink
charting scent of rain all crisp
curves, ten brave tips turning up
like memory’s unlocked joints.
Sclerotic with hours splintered of
husk and hull, she palped from
wires of silverfish flicking stout
of green, rustling her lullabies to
the snakes, be felled like sinews
leafing out beyond the river pale.
ONE IF BY SEA
Dearest world, I am sundered in
the dawning grey, fluting air
after the Shearwaters’ flights.
Making ceremony of the dark,
I rock me through the rough
and tumbled floor, where tales
of sunken ships pitch up from
hinterland of the wider world.
One if by sea, I air-bruise into
waves with lungful of sand on
some faraway beach, foam-agog
with 68.65 mph wind worth of
chills. Off the margin and into
vast, I hunger more for the black
walled in glass, rise and fall as
confits of the seer and peppery
seen casting off from the sunrise
on the ford, as I myself go reef
to ochre fowls, pearl-button shirt
nerves wet to the salt-set down.
BLUE HERONS
Stern dipped two seas in the herons’
girth, broken fish leaping floes
traversed anglers of men wristing
their young. Sun perched some
innards near, smooth and cool riving
five-fingered hands into the bottom
mouth, stewing at the hull as lips
to ear learned to breathe foreign air
about the Pacific warmth. If there
was such a thing as a soul, you,
song sparrows and silver birds, you,
blue herons like penny-spent wings
searching for a snug spot diving
waves on coral reefs, you will quick
licks of the throat’s longing and know
the sea by its hymns, before you
could only be whir of brine crashing
on shore, darken by a gray wash.
About the Poet
A four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net & Bettering American Poetry nominee, 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 with over 500 journals, Acentos Review, Barzakh, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, New Reader, Notre Dame Review, Rock and Sling, The Stillwater Review, Sundress Publications & Whiskey Island, among others, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. Lana resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.
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