BIO
A three-time Pushcart Prize 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), has had poetry and fiction featured with over 350 journals, 2River, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Journal, Grey Sparrow, Notre Dame Review, Otoliths, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, The Ilanot Review, and Westwind, among others. She resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.
https://www.facebook.com/Lana-Bella-789916711141831/
Dusk Skating on Still Water
The
ballad winter poured hard thunder
through
the slats, Stroh rum pulled in
the
gut, atrophy crowed black on her
heart
without weight. Whispers of frost
knurled
blue-skulled, darkness strewed
seraph
tongues over the pale of her back,
like
dusk skating on still water. Now she
plated a
meal in the house of volley-stones,
tofu
atomized with fondue heat, Cha-ohm*
minnow flicked scales
to her teeth, down
the
throat wild tumbler swilled, dim études
scratched
and scratched in analogue feed.
*Cha-ohm: a tropical member of the acacia family, native to mainland Southeast Asia, is a well-loved herb among Thais, Cambodians and Laotians. The most common way cha-om is cooked is with beaten eggs, or fried fish.
Dear Suki: Number Fifty-Eight
Dear Suki: Kawachi Fuji
Garden, 02’,
yours were hot wool socks
and fleece-
lined gloves dressed on
intimate skin,
primrose curls pooled out
of red cowl
hood, the fluorescent sky
sweat where
the sun collects, cream
egg-yolk bent
shadows of spring overlays
tangling on
tunnel walls and
polychromic wisteria
vines. Watching, held back
by barbed
wire and drafted lines, I
slipped under
the sonnets of blossoms’
pendent eaves,
sieved and swept in the
fever of imagist’s
strokes. And here was where
I breathed
myself thin mirrored the
veins of winged
careless breeze, each bore
evidence of a
winter fraught and summer
rained, until
you became more breath than
form, less
truth than abstract, just
ordinary enough
to stir my memory’s silt,
the similar way
awareness startled me to
your fingertips
laden with flight,
whispering through waltz
of alchemy, cinching my
throat with songs.