I blew your absence
on my trumpet lips like a pathos,
or a plunge chasing the hollow
hanging limp about my throat.

When I breathed out,
flocks of migrating timbres eddied
through the lead pipe,
and I thought, How brave are they
that they could be borne from
something so unstable
such as I? 

Then how my pinky finger,
browner than the mahogany sun,
facilitated the triggering
that wagged my mood into flames,
during which my other fingers
were doing their easy task
of holding on the trigger.

 

A Pushcart nominee, Lana has work published and forthcoming with over 160 journals, including a chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (Winter 2016), Abyss & Apex, Chiron Review, Coe Review, Foundling Review, Fourth & Sycamore, Galway Review, Harbinger Asylum, Literary Orphans, Pinyon Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Quarterly, Roanoke Review, William Jessup University, and elsewhere, among others. She divides her time between the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a wife of a talking-wonder novelist and a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps. 
https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe