Poems by Lana Bella

THAT I AM MY OWN SUFFERING

I was two weeks into my hospice living.
The half-moon and I became jetsam on
the eiderdown, contortionists interred
in dormancy, shoehorned with the com-
bustible of talc vulnerability and squalor.
Never been one to be loose with excess,
I tined spoons and halved plastic straws,
tongue slicked throat to bleed sedative
from its dubstep rhapsody downwards.
On the side table, stack of letters kissed
the bony knobs of my fingers, catching
the plastic tip of the IV bag as the weight
of swallowing contracted into a pestilent
human frog. I breathed the storm palling
the mental corridors, where jelled starlings
nested in the blue fur of my body, wearing
my skin like chain-link fence and broken
glass, piling relics in the runnels of silence.

 

A Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella is an author of two chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016) and Adagio (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), has had poetry and fiction featured with over 270 journals, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Pedro River Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Writing Disorder, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere, among others. She resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.