Of Dark, Of Light, Until All is Between, & What is There is What will be Gone
Of Dark, Of Light
At some point, you must be
this simple…to float. Of
not an ailing body startled
by lurch, perpendicular
to gravity, concentrating on
every part alive in riot of
blue. Cooling before aware-
ness of water, you threw
the ocean above shoulders,
intuited yet to stiff wings
tearing down the nest of sea.
Breathing alkali spell, you
triggered a tattered dive,
fester of trauma murmured
manatee grass from the glass
wall of your cranial bones.
Dark you down like planting
a seed, lunar moon made
doll out of you with star flints
and passel of pins, beset
the shadow of what was once
your body, adorning you to
the underside, gilding you in
reverse.
Until All is Between
Heaved by the river’s ribs, the old oak
begins to turn under my fingertips.
Glimmers become fish, planktons fold
down like mushroom laundry of flat
bones. At times for me I fall to dozing,
feeling fair in the froth, having splendid
air deared at my fleshing body of sun.
But I am khaki blot like olive drab, still
as river feasting after its hunger, easy
waves across the welkin where sky and
water is the same. For instance, this,
I am made aware of myself, even when
I’m gone sick on the lamp-light of fog,
tending inwards, while the bay shivers
malachite like slick wreath of Darjeeling.
What is There is What Will be Gone
A sonnet pulls from nocturne and presses to
my lips, sun-downing, as if somewhere
the world is upending inside out. I move
roseate-raised and nightingale sought,
can’t see I am a likeness tautening each soft
pad of fingers from my trodden shadow.
Years later, I will almost not remember this
memory to the wonder itself, a running
stitch of breaths lullabied and spun to rubble,
turning lisle around epode echoing down
into fist, only then did I learn how to track
the strokes between strength and tremor, and
rise and crumble, tailored to what lay withheld.
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, Notre Dame Review, Rock & 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