Lana Bella


DEAR SUKI: NUMBER SIXTY-SIX

Dear Suki: Rue Crémieux, 48’,
inclination captured fragments
of you in motion, like epithets
on heels. I pressed steel points
of flesh to your pale parasol tip,
eyes studied the way you teased
smokes with dancing mouth, bit
a host of crisp croissant like the
ballad propelled at sated tilt. Calf-
length frock brushed the dense
avenue; you let the fabric moved
with heat, hems white and licked
into shape at stockinged thighs.
Doves cooed just a touch west of
summer’s clouds; flinty dawn dew
across my beloved’s mind at play,
tasted her wares in careful excess—
a procession of words caught on
my tongue. How I felt then a keen
ratchet of breaths, in places where
the chest crusted thick, expended
as a bifurcated voyeur, smothering
edgeways and upside down with
your chaliced and wrought corset.



GHOSTS’ CRADLE

Sunless, with the last moment
spread thin, she found herself
moving inward. Visage tipped
into the vestibule of indefinite
shapes; bleached nodes flared
down the tulip tree. Lower than
a turtle in sleep, she massaged
ears to wormcast where gallery
of ants brandished red to night-
time air.

Concrete rose to her nasal gasps,
gleamed as automotive paint, wet
with scrotal sacs of fetal-preening
ghosts. Fingers held blackness in
neat palm; dew knuckled through
dull hiss of locusts’ warm tidings,
and if she were to pet their release
with skin of fugue, would they feel
of electrical eels in wanderlust or
wood thrush eking over the bloom
of constellations?



Lana Bella is an author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming). She has had poetry and fiction featured with over 300 journals— 2River, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, The Ilanot Review, The Writing Disorder, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Yes Poetry, among others.

She resides in the US, and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam.
 
 
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