Literary Orphans

Three Poems by Lana Bella

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MALIA

She plods into my waiting arms like
an open petal hungers for the bees.
Gummy and soft. A concerted coos,
clucks, and bubbles. Eloquent fruit of
my loins. Instrument of my instincts.
Lullabies for my hunger. Hair of black
ink curls into the silver belly of my story
telling. Sucking her tiny thumb like a
blind girl divines life from the mingle of
sweet saliva upon the finger’s grooves.
Rounded knees nudge deep where my
fatness jostles. Fast to dream. She is a
quiet tapestry cloaked in flesh.

I follow the river of her crooked form. My
finger poises above that button-nose where
a sliver of crusted mucus thrusting out
from the shadow, cradling threads of
the afternoon sun. Sooty lashes curtain
the amber lake, and upon its water lays
the light of the world. Sailing still a finger
to her primrose breaths that cling to the
nether bone, they are in rhythm with my
own.

An infinite oblivion. So through the sieve of
hours, days, years and lifetimes unfolding
beyond, debris will fall upon ruins. When
hollowness will purge all tenderness along
with memories. Yet I shall belt my body on
the back of sorrow then plunge beneath where
her parting sleeps. Into the living sea of our
waking dreams.

 

It is always I, and it is always her I am
holding. Like a dearest breath, well-loved,
in my motherly hands.

 

O Typekey Divider

 

SYNCHRONICITY

I see him,
and the shadows fall back.
Everything pales behind where
his silhouette slopes on the
fresh-turned earth.
Taking hold of his coat’s lapel,
the leathered skin feels grainy
between my fingertips.
Like how his shaggy beard chafes
my breasts raw,
roaming over the pale chasm lay.
A curious sensation probes from
under the weight and erosion
of his sinew,
stretches itself into the linings of
my inner cells.
Searching for traces of us
on the other side of synchronicity.
I swallow whole the distance, the sea,
the passing time:
the many hours on bitten tongues.
hungered words and labored ships.
Because somewhere in the depths
of memory,
there was a hiding place and in it,
my lover and I.

 

O Typekey Divider

 

THE HOUSE OF WRINKLED BONES

Outside, the air is crisp with wrinkled bones,
while the violet hours
slowly discard its poorly dressed skin
over the starved body
before slinking atop the frosty ground;
when the crescent moon
slopes saffron rays upon a lone woman
in a house gnarls of bordered evergreens.
Inside, long, white drapes
sweep the brown-carpeted floor,
as she sits by a squeaky window with its chipping paint
worn down from years of famished termites and rotting rain,
waiting there,
reeling in her foamed suspension
for the visiting ghost to
roll out of its pockmarked void at the chimes
of midnight bells.
Dung smoke knits the sleeping cold a wisp of pale sweater,
slightly puckered where the skirting tears,
when it lurks beneath the gold-crocheted chair,
that is wrought with ivory roses and cat’s eye stitch,
the woman stirs.
Eyes shift, nose sniffs the flowing scent, tongue darts
to taste the turning air
then she leans out,
with clawed whisper of
cold fingertips,
reaches over to stroke
the low-hanging stumps,
smooths back the sloppy curls of its silvered mane
grasps the unfurled hands
and sways against the caressed notes of
a carved out mandolin.

O Typekey Divider

Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than seventy journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Eunoia Review, New Plains Review, The Criterion Journal, The Ignatian Review, The Offbeat Literary, Whirlwind Press 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.
https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe

Lana Bella

O Typekey Divider

–Art by Petra

–Art by NiiCoLaZz

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