Goodbyes From Across the Table By Lana Bella

You sit across the table from me, a thousand synapses stowed upon your sleeve, condensation brewing where your receding hairline fades into paper-thin skin.

Your fingers, dressed in cloth of ill expectation, softly drum the countertop, stirring the moleculed air. My lips, of heralded burden come whispering, tasting heavy your blue-colored glance, lit grim in the moving light of the window, so with my eyes, I etch instead a fine streak at the horizon, where it turns a deep gray at the bottom of the tarried sky. Letting the cold drape my caramel skin through its winged breaths, the moon, I say, is away this evening, careless to the fate of its fellow beings. You move your head, just trivial enough for wisps of malaise to leave preys upon my heart, as a flyspeck of ache beneath the turn gives way to the crushing weight of pity. Laid kindly on my sewed up thoughts, it brings willing tears to my eyes. My keen mouth of sadness sighs your name, while laurels of memory set to rot on my tongue. Sprucing up my being, they pluck the welts and whimpers from my skin, carting off bucketfuls of many things. Ping ponging them back to you, I spin again toward the window, seeing my leaving as it travels upon the back of smoke and mirror, sweeping over the hard ground of the earth.

You, in seat of stone, with trembling hands, stroke my ghostly ones with measured warmth. I, and my last caress, held fast, wring life for your flesh to drink. Bare and bitter with rust, light on release.

© 2015 Lana Bella

Lana Bella has poetry and fiction anthologized, published, and forthcoming in Aurorean Poetry, Eunoia Review, Bareback Magazine, New Plains Review, The Criterion Journal,  Quail Bell Magazine, and many many others. She resides on a distant isle with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps.

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