Ascent leaves metal in the mouth,
the way incrust of a machine
distends outward from a simple
beginning. So you stay smooth
when the veins rise from furrowed
hands of need, through then up
and around like dark rain testing
the strength of you. Deep listening,
you peel a thick hide of shadow
that births to angles and blades,
precipitously exposed, as the hoof
beats of collision grow kinder at
the prompt of abandonment. That's
when you are an anvil giving way;
a flinching rut gone and yet to come,
where much of harm and healing
born into bones battering dust into
glint.

You find forgiveness in
the spectering fog,
edged like a tidepool
of mockery.
Foot by foot,
the wannest of
crooning
winked you to the bones,
part-thievery, part-beggar
in your throat.
Retrieved nights on
the plank of tongue once
branched spears and barbs,
you bled silence clotting
black ink to cupped hands,
even when the gerund
dressed of war over
your chest.
Lies loosed in fine threads,
black and snarling,
homewrecked the mouth
that took no whistling to heed,
for you will hold idolatry
on the dance in the breeze,
knowing also what it meant to
spread across memories
like a shadow.

Dark emoted out from the wall,
wraiths swiveled to the flaps
of midnight's optic nerves
in this alley of squandered air.
We ached the way light tore
from the bones, from the keen
rigidity of ourselves wrapped
in buzzing gnats and gun smoke,
as hunger trumped with greed,
serving dishes of barbed entrails
in dressing of winter’s spoils.
The wind, the dull glow of lock-
lipped silt clutched our lotus
seats with sky’s rash wheezing,
when we wiped dust from our hair
of rags, teaching us once more
to float gently down into the gaunt
of our stored fat, before the yard
vultures picked through bones
beneath these hours of vagrancy.

It's like finding an old memory
among dust falling, and how
it regenerates this empty lane of
something erstwhile sparse.
Small thuds beneath, you turn
ear to earth, to the emptiness
sick and yellow, hearing silt frosts
on feet. You ache because there
is nothing else, throat swollen
from billows of sky out to dilated
night, revealing the oblique life
that paves black to the hundred
steps of dirt.
Dear November,
now the rosebuds are dying on
the slab of castrated twigs in gales,
a canopy of swift hunger with
red wings span like spars of laser.
Yet you do not know an instant
lovelier than this, where you
touch eyes to snowfall osmosed
through stars, trailing your hands
like latitudes and longitudes,
casing your cool dark covers in ice.

Lana Bella, Burbank, California