A Hair’s Breath
My elbow caressed the fine down on your arm
as we stood.
Perching atop the quiet hill.
You didn’t say a word.
And, the silence was its own confession.
Its distance stretched across the clearing
where the evening light sloped
on the jagged rocks below.
The paralysis of a thousand nerves
froze me in stiffness.
I waited.
Hoping to feel the sharp stab of your dagger
to spur wake the cold click of my senses.
I felt you turned then.
More surely than if I’d been watching you.
Just a hair’s breadth towards me.
A deluge of pendulum swings in the concerted air.
And then, very quietly, you breathed me in.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t turn around.
If I had,
perhaps I would have seen the betrayed whisper
that already edged in nostalgia.
But, I was thinking of all the ways
a moment like this could be felt
as it traveled through a dormant sleep.
While the pausing time between breathing
will feed into the machinery of snapshots of
our memory.
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, Literary Orphans, Marco Polo Arts Literary, Mothers Always Write, Nature Writing, New Plains Review, Poetry Pacific, Snapping Twigs, Spank The Carp, The Camel Saloon, The Bangalore Review, The Bleeding Lion, The Commonline Journal, The Criterion Journal, The Higgs Weldon, The Screech Owl, The Voices Project, Thought Notebook Undertow Tanka Review, Wordpool Press, Beyond The Sea Anthology, War Anthology: We Go On, Wilderness House Literary Review, Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine. She lives bi-continents, in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a wife of a novelist, and a mom of two frolicsome imps.
Copyright © 2016 by Lana Bella
Randomly Accessed Poetics 