Author | Lana Bella
In the country at the dregs
of summer, with hunger
drove its stings into guts like
wasps’ bites, we both dug
our lives down by the dock,
ignorant to the hummingbirds’
migration, as the day,
tight-laced, blistered-lung,
and knuckles browned
against the sounds of mallet
over the marchland.
In your simple dress and I,
steering my calico legs,
we rode on the sun-licked
leaves as summer cast
its last wisps on the humps
of our held fingers,
stirring speculation to how
a bristled blue jay
pecking the bulb of the spotted
beebalm, could stitch a fair
weight of grey plumage
on its wings.
That day we tasted rum in
the shade, chased cigarettes’
smoke to the edge of
horizon’s rubicund skeleton;
then every so often,
you would ball your laughs like
yarn the feel of your dress,
smear the air into orbits
with the drums of your fingers
on my pinched knees.
So we lay, grass-bent, stilling
to the mercurial scapula of
the wind and the dangling
promise of a budding autumn.
About the Author | Lana Bella A three-time Pushcart Prize & 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 380 journals, 2River, Acentos Review, California Quarterly, Comstock Review, Expound, Grey Sparrow, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, Waccamaw, Word/For Word, among others, and work to appear in 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.