I stood alone at the salt edge,
mukluk with lug soles dwelt
ripples of the Pacific in broad
lines, stirring engines of self-
war. A marbled murrelet shot
out from the corduroy nest of
the ocean, smattering close to
the pink-eyed moon. Walking,
I walked until the smallness of
mercury melt into water, down
the minerals slept beneath sea’s
moat of fish, steeping in years
of bellicose upswell, helplessly
florid in details, pearling clouds
from the drown of inshore stones
and ghost crabs. Cinders-slate,
my heart pulsed in fingers held
out to the turbulent blue, yellow
hair traveled like a river, anabolic
eyes threaded through relic bones
of the riparian trees, where light
turned black then silent, all rust
catkins spiked, and where some-
thing else, gray-scale serpentine,
spun about the fluted trunk then
sped on. It jogged to mind of the
murrelet in flight, dream-stillbirth,
infinite; its passage cleaved on to
time-based ephemera, reaching
through the lacquered side of topo-
graphy, only to feed, spawn, arcs
leaked across the fluent sky, like
cruets pouring wine into throat,
eclipsed fast with its downward
weight.
A three-time Pushcart Prize & Bettering American Poetry nominee, Lana Bella is an 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), has had poetry and fiction featured with over 400 journals, Acentos Review, Comstock Review, Expound, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Waccamaw, Word/For Word, among others, and work to appear in Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. 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.