Lana
Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized,
published and forthcoming with more than ninety journals, including a
chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (2015), Aurorean
Poetry, Chiron Review, Poetry Quarterly, QLSR (Singapore), elsewhere
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.
CONSENT TO NOTHING, AND YOURSELF UNSEEING
Like long drinks from a tureen of a deep
lake, you gulp in bold liquid earth with
each sip a familiar sedative pregnant on
your tongue. You are thinking you come
here for convivial loneliness, where chaos
drops by once or twice for your friendly
ear and a few polite "how goes it"s jostle
at the elbow, but whether its habitués care
too little or not at all, you hope everyone
is alike in their ignorance and wretched-
ness. Of course how much strength for a
stranger to demand such from you when
they are no more than an afterthought is
a torque of poison, when you just long to
slip inside the fluid spill, becoming a speck
of foamed bubble staining on the beer glass,
lurking beyond nothing and sweet unseeing.
Vapid and sad and your last droplets con-
sumed, perhaps you should whistle at the
barkeep for another long drink, before your
hold on the night shrinks by the waist side,
and your stoic pride stretches so thick that
you no longer give a damn.
SMALL AND SMALLER
Inside her cupped hands sprouts a small universe.
Inside this universe, another one lays smaller. It is
not a bird that takes root, nor a mouse, rather a
sharp question that presses its lips against moist
skin, where ink notes leak into alphabets, incise
through tiny beads of perspiration. Words churn
this way and that, but they could not know, taking
a turn back, to which their clusters of deformity
would be the weight she would never regain. Instead,
now they lay soft and yielding, and even if they were
to step out off her hands, the air would grab hold of
their whiskers-like-wings and carry them towards
the edge of the unknown. So they will stagnate where
deep whimpering drifts by in the universe, write up
new letters as it has done before when she opens one
hand and closes the other.
THE BENT AIR
Just as swift, the air that clings to light's moving
form turns cold,
hard and bent and ready to break.
Yet, there is nothing to hold on to in
such a set body,
but compound of diesel
fuel and spikes of acid rain.
A salvaged smell.
Reminds one of those memories lumbering upon
the ill-used tracks,
with miles and miles of telephone poles
strung by rubber-coated wires,
stretching long on either side of the tubes,
and no blinking lights to put on guard
for careless idlers.
All appear nevertheless false,
the way clarity ghosts its pale back through
the quiet scenery,
and wards the mortal world from the bent
dregs of air that feeds on itself.
form turns cold,
hard and bent and ready to break.
Yet, there is nothing to hold on to in
such a set body,
but compound of diesel
fuel and spikes of acid rain.
A salvaged smell.
Reminds one of those memories lumbering upon
the ill-used tracks,
with miles and miles of telephone poles
strung by rubber-coated wires,
stretching long on either side of the tubes,
and no blinking lights to put on guard
for careless idlers.
All appear nevertheless false,
the way clarity ghosts its pale back through
the quiet scenery,
and wards the mortal world from the bent
dregs of air that feeds on itself.
~Lana Bella
