POETRYBlack Tinselby Lana Bella
I follow the tinsel thread of her affected euphony,
until it becomes a sound lost to remorse,
where nothing is alive
to plunge through the breathless air--
dissonance bleeds all around like a miscarriage
in rings of mismatched pulses and vibrations,
with light is a long distance away,
longer than the cautious drops of water
down the nether plain.
She is my dark peeled from flesh,
whose rituals are no more grating on the nerve
than the easing notes at a funeral,
yet, I'm still burning soft beneath the hems
of her wax-like breaths,
as if she has leaned close to my ear and roared.
Lana Bella has published work and forthcoming with over 120 journals, including a chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (Spring 2016), Ann Arbor Review, Chiron Review, Literary Orphans, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere, among others. She divides her time between the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a wife of a talking-wonder novelist, and a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps. https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe
spider up her thigh in the dimly lit room
held down, stared down
embers of the abyss snap around her
My father sexually abused me.
When I got married,
I hyphenated my name.
No one questioned it at the time.
But in the middle of my parents’ late divorce,
everyone wants to know about names.
Nietzsche warned us not to look
long into the abyss, or it will look long
into us.
It was finally
his home until
abruptly
his mind flashed
all the times he had entered a
boy
i was depressed,
and i wanted
to take a
walk;
you said you'd join me—
didn't mean i wanted
netflix and chill,
it happened before words came
to tell me how to feel about it
newly connected neurons torn apart
or perverted—
forever firing blanks into the microbiological air
As a child
The lessons taught
Can bring a pain never thought.
The lessons on trust
And heartache
Sear the soul.