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Lana Bella poetry

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/

 

 

 

 

Lana Bella

THROUGH THE HOURS

by Lana Bella

 

The elderly man was ready to pull those
odd-shaped chairs and tables
in across the shingle floor away from the rain,
when light and water burst through
the bamboo slats,
even the air lost its grip on the weight of
this cold gray day,

he looked up to the dying sliver of the sun
as a tail end of ducks’ V formation
took off into the liquid landscape,
in this mist,
he reached through the hours
to the front of an old dream,
back in the Vietnam war,
where the visible and invisible
covered the ears and eyes and crippled sins
with bullets and cries and vain foresight,

leaning toward the scuttle of rain,
he saw an upside-down soldier being strung
with ropes from his feet, bleeding,
tongue lay sprawl under an August storm,
infinity sat hollow inside his skull orbits,
only birds of prey passed over,
their hunger hung heavy
like ireful sickles in the hands of masked gorillas,
madness greased into their mirth,
and sorrow stained the sky
a magnificent black,

along with the few remaining villagers,
he traipsed the bare-bones rice paddies
under a September rain,
when the bird family came back,
circling above a peasant woman
rocking a child whose body

was mangled, and soaked through,
like a rancid fruit,
he stood rooted on the bed of water-logged soil,
head bent to the wind-swept pour,
listening for the sounds
of soft footsteps of his companions
leaving crunches away from that earthly grave,

stranded here now with the shame of history,
he touched the aged yellow clippings of war,
cautious to the thousand teardrops
collided from the sky
against the ones flooding his insides to fullness,
as always,
he was caught between
an ever tenuous self-conceived fever
that summoned the ghosts of dead ancestors
from four decades past,
and the red pulps of war-torn maelstrom
that swam as wisps of accordion,
limbic, and deep in the underbelly
of his bloodstream,

if he could only know how to
soothe the lacerated language and moans
from bloody shapes,
in his sleep and wake,
for he feared the deciphering
of hands when they were cupped in prayers,
and the long gulps of air
that unceasingly stretched into howls,
turning up the kerosene lamp by the window bay,
he tossed a carafe of hot rice wine
down the tobacco-tempered throat,
chilled, sloshed and arthritic
upon a wool settee,
while his ghosts milled the earth in flaming felts,
spinning together again
the past, present, and future,
with tearing red threads.

 

 

THIS IS EVERY LOVE STORY EVER TOLD

 

you are a rotten tangerine hanging on
the bough of my tree, half in waiting
to splinter off, the other half already
bruised through from maturity and
hungry worms—

I watch westerly wind leap into your
gaping rind, sunlight snakes beneath
your insides like the way the ocean rushes
toward caves and dunes, leaving just
enough mystique in its wake—

seeing your whole spotted and incised,
I arch my limbs past the shingled wall
then over the ground to catch your fall,
you look at me with sad orange eyes still
wet of juice before hurling earthward in
scattering core, seeds and open pith—

someday I’ll look back on this moment
and wish I’d known how to follow you
home through black, for this is you and
me born of sun, sugar and dirt, before
you stumble and fall, before I lose all my
leaves to despair—

 

 

 

BIO

Lana BellaA Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella is the author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press). She has had her poetry and fiction featured in over 200 journals including Columbia Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Third Wednesday, among others. She resides in the U.S. and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom to two far-too-clever frolicsome imps.

 

 

 

 

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