Like The Blue Like Infinity
From you,
the wings of a seraphim grow.
Like the blue.
Like infinity.
You tore the currents from
the shore,
you belted the sky against its flesh and
held back the threat of rain.
But there was a recent time when you
fell through the thick of clouds
and fell some more,
the heart pattered out,
the bone slipped into death,
and the truth peeled away at the skin.
A limpid metaphor.
Your tendons were led, strung up like
skulls on pikes.
Your tears, clear droplets mingled with
plump pity were
flicked beneath the burning sighs.
While breaths wrung out to be strangled by
the claws of mud-coated ground.
But, the patient one, with hearty bale of madness
you had carried on.
Stripping apathy of its sorcery.
Leaving it eyeless and dull.
Then you stirred when tomorrow arched
across yesterday,
where the hallowed calm
darkened over water-lights of today.
Pleasures and pain. Glory and shame.
And skyward to light you soared,
on extended wings.
by Lana Bella
Under My Dark
Five long hours. Under my dark. I sprawl awake.
Tumbling through the house. Sinking against the
windowpane, watching rained acoustics patter on
the terraced roof. Cries of raindrops. Mingle with
a symphony of ghosts roaming about me. Then I
pour myself a memory from a simmering cauldron,
flavored of alphabet scars and flakes of consciousness.
Hands on the pot. A sudden blink. How do I pour the
liquid thoughts and lettered inks into a bottomless beaker
without leaving my body in a pool of shadows? But now,
my lips thirst for drink. To warm over the cold where the
bone is hollow. Until, I lean in, something exposed and
glassy, echoing on the surface. It is my eyes staring back
at me. Gliding through the fluid with hooked arms. And
its mouth slurping up the pale gullet, heaving off the
squirting blood. The muddy mass of flesh throws up
in the mirage. Then high above, a dullard of rain again
breaks over the house. If I listen, my heart would once
more weep and my eyelids would suspend in tears. So I
stretch my skin where the stairs lay muted and heavy,
under the particled air into which darkness goes.
by Lana Bella
Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than sixty journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Burningword Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, Mothers Always Write, New Plains Review, The Criterion Journal, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps.
