Lana Bella - Three poems

REAR VIEW

The heart stops. The dark stark up
from beneath her fingernails like
wrecks on water, frost smoke
glows through lonely. Island and
underskirt press into thick hips,
lending to the reverie of the last
girl on earth. Periphery loots from
her to meet the artifice of wind,
rustling all memories and miseries
pistilled with roots for the scrawl
of elegies. Nocturnes of the sea
spend ripe in her mouth cooling to
relic of things wild and doomed,
cadence of sounds holds eventides
as she holds jetsam to her chest.



INSIDE THE CANVAS TOP

It starts with forsythia and
sacrosanct; the portrait
of you whispering blooms.
Each day, I embroider
throat as a wound, smoke
and drift wag as good as
a tongue, dripping ooze on
the canvas top. Be some-
thing the night unlocks, I lift
your stems above the light,
sending hiss of words as
might a hot mouth on empty.
Now I paint your flesh into
the trees beside dark, set
birds to the palm that opens
to coincide in shadow, as
if you are made depthless by
an emptiness vast as my skin.


THE END OF NOVEMBER

The girl with dark ticking eyes tossed back
to whatever November hissed, menaced
why such a thing could spill colors out to
the darkness of her room, evincing not a bit
of sorrow. Hand crinkled marks into light,
flecks of sky-sugar bled red-tipped and soft,
the way wounds of mouth embraced by
a negative stumble. Leaving herself she fell
her way into dusk, avoided the knees of
things, ending with the labor of risking bone
once ransacked by a man’s violence, made
dark outside her window from his gratuity
hold. It was the end of November. Wasn’t it.
Lurid hands assembled kittens brought to
her in the night, shivered to her in static and
flies, and how she waited for sunrise to
skip clear to midnight, seating bone kicked
hard the lunette shut, sobered herself of light.




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 450 journals, Acentos Review, Comstock Review, EVENT, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Rock and Sling, Lampeter Review, & The Stillwater Review, among others, and work appeared in 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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