Palm roughs for the flick of a coin,
you are an open-hand rattler
hollowing out the air’s stiff grains.
Moving autumn with your wake,
you walk roads of names you long
to remember, curving at the places to
go back, ghosting lambent beneath
smoky hills. Big sky knocks birds
from the trees as if the aches in you
explode out the woolen stiff of
your hand; fingers pass lonely from
tipsy sloshes of a cup, yet holding
back the thirst that will bitter through
the bone and bloat. Shelter ghosts
on sturdy spine, you run to the soft
gray edge some miles out, hold onto to
ohms of someone else’s nocturnes,
running away, running towards
the well-lit dim of you running into
a sunset, sucked for air like a locked
click, your flight in the instant’s damp.
A four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net & Bettering American Poetry 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 work featured in over 500 journals, Barzakh, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, Midwest Quarterly, New Reader, Notre Dame Review, Sundress Publications & Whiskey Island, among others, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. Lana resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.