BIO
Lana Bella is published in over ninety journals, including a chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (2015), Aurorean Poetry, Chiron Review, Contrary Magazine, Elsewhere, Poetry Quarterly, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She is also a novelist, wife and a mom living in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam.
.
A NEW YORK MINUTE
As the sun ascends,
your kisses drape my body
like a long trench coat
“We are here, my love,
in New York city”, you whisper
between breaths and lips
full of my dark braid.
You run a finger across my palm
tracing from west to east,
outlining our kickoff caravan at the
southernmost point of Cabo San Lucas
to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, winding round
the sandstock arches in Utah, over the
Trail Ridge Road through Colorado,
then by way of Lakeshore Drive curving
Lake Michigan, where the sand is smooth
and off-white, then aboard the soaking tour
of Niagara Falls before driving deep into
the heart of Manhattan. So on this
morning with winter on its way out, along
with hints of early spring creeping in, and
soft rain patters against the hotel’s windowpane,
I strain my neck chasing the shadows
over the Hudson River with thawed out snow as
you wring every last drops of my sighs with your
many tales of a New York minute.
.
BLACK TINSEL
I follow the tinsel thread of her affected euphony,
until it becomes a sound lost to remorse,
where nothing is alive
to plunge through the breathless air–
dissonance bleeds all around like a miscarriage
in rings of mismatched pulses and vibrations,
with light is a long distance away,
longer than the cautious drops of water
down the nether plain.
She is my dark peeled from flesh,
whose rituals are no more grating on the nerve
than the easing notes at a funeral,
yet, I’m still burning soft beneath the hems
of her wax-like breaths,
as if she has leaned close to my ear and roared.
