the excess on blossom drops
will sigh, then heave against
the boy's figure perching low
by the seat of a Mexican lime—
somewhere beyond, a flight of
cormorants caught in sunlight,
held the jet-twitch of dirigible
earth with the conveyor of the
boy's wonder coiling in orbits,
innocence nested from stone
steps to leaves—he was all at
once the shadows of his youth
and the weight of vertebrae
piercing the sky, for here, lean
and fast like a buck that could
leap in a child's jungle gym, he
throbbed with the dawn's first
light, part bark, part root, part
spindle stem, where the babel
of arachnid traffic peered warily
over echelons of prickly pear,
feigning the motion of the boy's
mother shouldering out from
the kitchen window, dark-swept
eyes tossed wide and through
the mango grove, throaty peals
calling him home at repast time—
Dear Suki: Number 40
Dear Suki: Monterey Bay, May 20th,
I'll go by train to the sea of my grief;
body veins in brine, butters through
the coastline rattling from the weight
of interlocked metal chains on asphalt.
Percocet toss me back to black cloud,
ignoble at evening sea's knife-edges,
obscure, anomalous, a dozing stroke
on Van Gogh's canvas. Nowhere near,
you have become pliable, sky-decree,
a softness entombed inside the lesser
weight of this impetuous weather and
tinny dew’s tap on glass. Now if only I
could keep my eyes from traveling out
to the dotted dark, where cypress trees
entrenched in arterial spray, each note
bent the tufted-yellow grass, rectangle
with the march of abandon and detour
signs, barometric and fizzled, scudding
long your garment's tail--marking your
leaving like smokes sped into graphite
Lana Bella has two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), with poetry and fiction in journals such as California Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Poetry San Pedro River Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. Bellaresides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam. facebook
