Lana Bella


Clinic Blue

I am sown through by every hymn
tipped with red, staring out from
moth letters shied down their yellow.
The dawn comes but I wake always
to Merlot-warm, limbs slunk on lace
and stagger like stubs into sleeves,
fingers fluting ripe with tiny cursive
bursts of sunlight names. This day,
I am myself and none of me; mouth
smoke-lean Gauloise in to kiss, toxin
rush dislodges sleep from my eyes,
shearing close to air in measures of
memory. Darkling, I am clinic-blue,
received into the drowning wine and
hard morphine, skin purring like ropy
marsh of drunk syllables, dingy and
blown about its mid-life seas.


LANA BELLA is a four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net, & Bettering American Poetry nominee, and is the 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). She has had poetry and fiction featured with over 450 journals, including Acentos Review, Comstock Review, EVENT, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Rock & Sling, The Lampeter Review, & The Stillwater Review. 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.


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