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Poems by Lana Bella1) CONCRETE I have cast down empires with my sad eyes, draped paramours with crinoline sash beneath sharp blades of guillotines. I fought them to exorcise their hatred, even my prayers fell through dirt searching for water, where rain had dried into wind. It was said if I cry hard enough I will remember my point of departure, before I had to silence everything that left me. So there I was, my mind's hands couldn't steeple into a reprieve, I weighed then the idea of my primordial, of becoming a knot, wrestling in leakage of moral perfidies, drawing mercy from concrete. 2) RED AND WHITE POLKA DOT DRESS comes summer, I will dance in my red and white polka dot dress that loses its dots during winter, in fact, I have never forgotten the sun, or how the cold can endlessly protract until it becomes a hollow of black, orphaned by the arrival of such gravity, the red and white dots leap from my dress just so, pleating at the exposed tips of the fallow grass, waiting in an infinite wait, I watch the sun tear itself from the maple leaves, toppling down the red and white dots, spewing light in all directions, just when I think their tendons and skin would rot away, the wind bobs like gulls over surf on the mosaic dots, blowing the excess away, catching the red and white tails with my hands, delicately, I tuck them inside my dress' pockets, then together, we walk in search for the tattooed rhythms of summer-- 3) NEAR THE BOTTOM I wanted to tell you but my voice has gone soft like a mad crab falling noiselessly into a boiling pot, given the scale of such hindsight, I turned away, sure that my masquerade would soon pull gravity from its earthly station, holding up the edifice of our love story in the palms of the atmosphere-- the story began with you eternally remembered, in this photograph of aged sepia tone and frame- less corners, I was eight and you ten, your shirt rolled up about the midriff, my left hand draped over your thin shoulder, fingers coiled into bare flesh, and in that snapshot, I held the lump of your innocence in my caress-- even now, I knew whose acoustics would pollute you, when the sounds of my syllables became thick with gurgles as a tired drunk struggling with speech, so we both ran away from this place of longing and consolation, still, I reached out for you, but you appeared distant, so indiscernible as to be abstract-- 4) TODAY'S BREAD FEEDS YESTERDAY'S HUNGER if you must, stick to drinking something that will dull the taste buds like lime-flavored water, for today's bread feeds yesterday's hunger, and tomorrow's swallow might just be a whisper-thin, along an old railroad track, you plod laterally to where the dust gives way by the sagging caboose, your tongue is held down looking for nutrients that are wrung from dumpsters' cigarette smoke, your mind, bone-dry as a hundred-year old skeleton's, climbs back down the inner world of sawdust and tumbleweeds for food-- 5) HERALDRY parting the currents, I hunt for lost pearl where tales of sunk ships swim among fish guts and centuries-old heraldry, sinking in a pulling mud so soft it could be quick sand, I cannot see my feet through the air's tinted glass, even though I am holding the moon over the night water, the pool here stirs a trail of briny sea that draws close then back, while my breaths, caught in the funnel of murk and dust storm that prowls in the open shadows, like metallic poison seeping inside the blood stream, midway across, I pull my seat onto a stone, sensing the bed of grass playing hopscotch about my ankles beneath the fluid fold, then one side of the conduit negates the other, because at some point when the illusion gains speed while the dark gallops overhead, I become just another reflection in the water-- 6) VITAE a black poem fell through the sky to a white landscape, hyphens then colons slid from cleft formation, and question marks sprung into every pore on the grim snow, you touched fingers to the cold disarray, tugging free the apostrophe keys that were pinned between the strong arm of the wind and raw pine roots, chafing of skin on its powdery track, the curious teeth of the air flicked dispersed shapes of onyx-skin upside down until all their ink drained out, while the time-clock ticked ticking--
#Unreal #Poetry #Poems #Time #Polkadots #Sun #Creation #Shipwrecks #Hunger #Bread #Love #Longing #Concrete
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