Erratum

Perhaps it was someone else’s

memory, for you ghostwrote in

a tough floating bone-battered

into surf, loose threads a whirl-

pool of india-ink streamers;

and as if the midnight sun had

stitched you through with arsenic

lure, your porcine hands were

aspen-wreathed, painting storms

and diphthong in restless, fluent

fingers.

Shadows plucked out of pupils,

tilting silent with birds laden in

flight, deserting you for the wiles

of scavenged hollow deep where

only a spattering of echoes went

to drown. Surfacing, you rose up

the blinding light, just there, pale

tactile map of home lay portents

in the sky, galvanized to the pulling

gasps of harrow water, javelin hove

toward the odes of frost and wind.

And one by one, your swim licked

the winter’s smattering reefs, until

briny trail of deliquesced dawn fed

crisp like sodden seaweed, where

your fins metered out like staffs and

the gills cast in carmine and ruby

dye through pocks of salt and kelp.

LANA BELLA is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 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 360 journals such as 2River, The Acentos Review, and California Quarterly.