“A Face in an Endless Sea” by Lana Bella

Into the waking sea of stirring succubi,
I walk through the cobblestone with
measured insolence. It is my life and
yet it is not. It is a known street yet
serpents edge the ground my feet have
not trodden upon. A revised life. While
it is endured on a rewritten script. Like
curious pages from an aged notebook,
flush of spell-casting recipes and archaic
theorems. Drafted in inked calligraphy
from my hand held within someone else’s.
I am thinking I ought to shake away the
cold fingertips that I cannot slake. And
what it would be like to will my private
thoughts, and travel without fragmented
memories. But my verbal bones are deep-
seated and buried, pack together to guard
the centermost. Leaving bare the external
skin. To which I persist on as a compressed
infection, neither growing smaller in mass
nor vanishing into a fictional poem. Yet,
I know not with certainty whether I am
the vast sky or its dispersed molecules.
Or just a face in an endless sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction published and forthcoming with Anak Sastra, Atlas Poetica, Bareback Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Beyond Imagination, Buck-Off Magazine, Calliope Magazine, Cecile’s Writers’ Magazine, Dead Snakes Poetry, Deltona Howl, Earl of Plaid Lit, Eunoia Review, Eye On Life Magazine, Family Travel Haiku, First Literary Review-East, Five Willows Literary Review, Foliate Oak Literary, Garbanzo Literary Journal, Global Poetry, Ken*Again, Kind of a Hurricane Press, Marco Polo Arts Literary, Mothers Always Write, Nature Writing, New Plains Review, Poetry Pacific, Spank The Carp, The Camel Saloon, The Commonline Journal, The Higgs Weldon, The Voices Project, Thought Notebook, Undertow Tanka Review, Wordpool Press, Beyond The Sea Anthology, War Anthology: We Go On, Wilderness House Literary Review, and has been a featured artist with Quail Bell Magazine. She resides on some distant isle with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps.  facebook.com/niaallanpoe