The Printing Press

April 2015 | back-issues, poetry

i want to build you castles of words,

letters looping into stairs & banisters –

standing up billboards of breath

in a sleepless city lit by commas &

question marks. i want to sprinkle consonants

into your dreams & i want you to wake up with poetry

under your tongue. i’ll soften all the vowels

that dewdrop on the roses & i’ll sculpt

the adjectives into a vehicle

to the extraordinary. my fingers

may be feeble & my heart may spin

rambling novels before it’s through,

but i’ll keep restacking these bricks

and trimming these topiaries

until every last syllable

comes out right.

by Sarah Marchant

Sarah Marchant is a writer, poetry editor, and literary enthusiast living in St. Louis.

Lana Bella

April 2015 | back-issues, poetry

Like The Blue Like Infinity

From you,

the wings of a seraphim grow.

Like the blue.

Like infinity.

You tore the currents from

the shore,

you belted the sky against its flesh and

held back the threat of rain.

But there was a recent time when you

fell through the thick of clouds

and fell some more,

the heart pattered out,

the bone slipped into death,

and the truth peeled away at the skin.

A limpid metaphor.

Your tendons were led, strung up like

skulls on pikes.

Your tears, clear droplets mingled with

plump pity were

flicked beneath the burning sighs.

While breaths wrung out to be strangled by

the claws of mud-coated ground.

But, the patient one, with hearty bale of madness

you had carried on.

Stripping apathy of its sorcery.

Leaving it eyeless and dull.

Then you stirred when tomorrow arched

across yesterday,

where the hallowed calm

darkened over water-lights of today.

Pleasures and pain. Glory and shame.

And skyward to light you soared,

on extended wings.

by Lana Bella

Under My Dark

Five long hours. Under my dark. I sprawl awake.

Tumbling through the house. Sinking against the

windowpane, watching rained acoustics patter on

the terraced roof. Cries of raindrops. Mingle with

a symphony of ghosts roaming about me. Then I

pour myself a memory from a simmering cauldron,

flavored of alphabet scars and flakes of consciousness.

Hands on the pot. A sudden blink. How do I pour the

liquid thoughts and lettered inks into a bottomless beaker

without leaving my body in a pool of shadows? But now,

my lips thirst for drink. To warm over the cold where the

bone is hollow. Until, I lean in, something exposed and

glassy, echoing on the surface. It is my eyes staring back

at me. Gliding through the fluid with hooked arms. And

its mouth slurping up the pale gullet, heaving off the

squirting blood. The muddy mass of flesh throws up

in the mirage. Then high above, a dullard of rain again

breaks over the house. If I listen, my heart would once

more weep and my eyelids would suspend in tears. So I

stretch my skin where the stairs lay muted and heavy,

under the particled air into which darkness goes.

by Lana Bella

Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than sixty journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Burningword Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, Mothers Always Write, New Plains Review, The Criterion Journal, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps.