"A Sense of Falling" and "Requiem"

A Sense of Falling

You stood a curve way from 
the memory of pine, marking
shadow of driftwood. And
there, by a fine mist of birds
washing in autumn dusk,
you held salt for the deer to
feed, moving the earth to
mud in the slenderest of light.
It began like this. A sense of
falling. Fingertips on the verge
of touch, you sought low like
rain’s cool hand shot through
dense peaks and canyons,
like something was iridescent
and riding the wind. Deep from
within, wanderlust feathered
what night opened to the north,
just before you glanced back
white, up, over, under, starved
in the wet wood stealing way
to vigil under the dark, void sky.

 


 

Requiem

But she was only shadows for
relic, vined up the lattice
work of astral rise. Drawing
air to the beds of her form
turning through another room,
she limped the house where
every wall was the dark sun. 
Mindful to the hunger that
tethered into sleep, she kissed
the night from the throat of
absinthe blanche, drinking for
a voyage as yet unplanned.
Trailing sandalwood like ink
etching out rows of provocation,
she listed between salt and
absolution as though she'd risen
from the deepest water, where 
water stretched the length of 
a hurting girl. Her posture sad-
struck for the pregnant pause
by the lunette bay, fingers on
the wrong hands on the wrong
head looking out from the wrong
house, growing invisibly faint.

 

 

Lana Bella

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 had poetry and fiction featured with over 500 journals, Acentos Review, Barzakh, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, New Reader, Notre Dame Review, Rock and Sling, The Stillwater Review, Sundress Publications & Whiskey Island, among others, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. 

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Monday, July 2, 2018 - 11:27