poems by Lana Bella

Love as it always was
He hears my words in a dream.
Distantly.
Free of
rigid lines,
unraveled from ill-defined knots. And stirring like dirt in the rustle of gold foil.
Stoking my ghosts from the whispering air
into flames,
he catches in vain the rising steam
amidst the charged fire.
Like a possession.
Embers in waiting.
But like love,
time and again,
they burn in shadow and
smolder without noise.
He needs to gather my molecules
and culled in a lidded vault.
To stow on a shelf.
When I just
need to see him just as he is,
no more than he used
to be.

 
Universal Carving
The midnight train departed from Hampton Court
station. He went on murmuring through the signaled
horns. Held between a light-struck hooves of the air
and shadowed carriage. And half-devoured under an
English blasting rain. “It’s quite docile actually for this
time of year, darling”, he said. I’d always known he
liked the soggy cold, for his eyes were stained deep
of teal-slate orbs. I snuck a glance towards the beyond
sky. An infinite dark, peppered with hurrying trees and
spray. At the sheer edge of horizon, the armored jaw of
the wind was lopping off the moon about its neck with a
fine cutlass, draining nearly the ashy gold. While the torrent
swept wide its watery bone, plunging down the metal roof
then gutting through the graveled earth. A liquid violence.
Yet, nothing more than a mutual universal carving. Where
the depths of chaos pillaged outside and soaring notes of
passion caressed within. And never was there a more curious
state than being caved inside an intimate skin of a lover and
that of the cleaving pulses of the rain.

Black Time and Blank Space
The weeping willow hangs with tumbling hair, above
me. Trembling its foliage green on my bony shoulders,
and calling out my name. Over and over. Spittle sows
upon dew-filled grass. Cascading beneath the blades’
jagged points. And trickling down to where my body
lays dying. Words scrape the flecks of gold from my
skin, veiling me behind a curtain of traversing ghosts.
Between clarity and suspense. Now I long to stretch
the motionless fingertips towards the sun, finding my
way across to the bed of clouds, pulling apart its butter-
milk sky. But it is someone else’s sunrise, for my stay
there is sped through a tunneled wind’s breath. In a
shaft of black time and blank space.