CHARLESTON

by Lana Bella

In Charleston, South Carolina,
there is a word that means
the rending from inertia
into the unbodied acreages of
an indigo past where ancient feet
take to running, as the hills warm
with red and the westerly dust
thrusts under the Carolinians’
lament. One could always feel
the idle precision of the heavy
lidded eyes of the townsfolk,
like a trail of cigarette smokes
filling their grapevine with words
they could only whisper behind
cupped hands.

An affluent town like this one,
thickly dank in vanity and
domed sight-line, doesn’t always
have a freight train cutting
through the bustling miles of
history. Still, time hangs over,
new prospects hum with
the dichotomy of all the old
obsolescence.

Tonight, the dead wakes to roam
without their bleached white
bones, in a world where the dark
is consumed by lark sparrows
and Brewer’s blackbirds fighting
for space, with the operatic
passion of Porgy and Bess
drapes like damp laundry over
the raised wall of Folly Beach,
while the moon pours more wine
over the earth and sings low
James Taylor’s Carolina in My Mind.

BECAUSE I KNEW YOUR FACE INSIDE THE EYE OF A VINTAGE CAMERA

A path to somewhere not here,
you pooled in hollow through film
of my vintage camera, a glowing
wyrm spun and interwove, raised
up the mounds of sand, shifting,
always shifting, cast me finally
over the spines of sun. I was inert,
orchard-lit with breaths of baying
horses, where you halted letting
in discord, immune to my concert
of shoulders above ribs, spilling
of bones refused to keep. But still
I coiled, shadows lie, imagining you
smooth saline held in my invisible
depth-strokes, fluttering gradations
from periphery to bitten shins, as
you broke pale into the embrace of
vines, sent buds to sheath of red.

UNDERWATER LAKE

Knife-palette trees touched fingers
to midnight, and how the cold
hurt you into a break like throbbing.
A collection of breaths closed in
on the pour of sky, your mouth, red,
agilely lithe, laughed away the firs
risen tall on algal blooms, where
bodies of birds laced through with
a continent of shadows. Already you
were bent with nightshade and fox-
glove, where the slightest tremors
may pitch you down the underwater
lake, around which the fossilized
bones of unnamed fishes silver
the currents in slime-spotted hymns.

BIO

A three-time Pushcart Prize, 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). She has had poetry and fiction featured in over 400 journals including, Acentos Review, Comstock Review, Expound, EVENT, Ilanot Review, and Notre Dame Review, among others. She also has work forthcoming 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. Her work can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/Lana-Bella-789916711141831/