I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
—Vincent van Gogh
About Lana
Cat mama, dog mama, rainy day enthusiast, former New Yorker Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. She holds degrees in Mathematics and Psychology, as well as MFAs in Poetry and Writing Popular Fiction. She’s worked as an inventory taker, fact-checker, customer service representative, actuary, milieu therapist, and science museum writer & exhibit coordinator.
Architect of the “severed sonnet” and other invented forms, her poems appear in such places as Bluebird Word, Bracken, Comstock Review, Quill & Parchment, Journal of Expressive Writing, Exterminating Angel Press, Peregrine, RavensPerch, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Little Free Lit Mag, The MacGuffin, SWING, Waxing & Waning, Amythyst Review, and The Braided Way.
Author of 14 full-length poetry collections and chapbooks, the most recent are: Sky Over (Fernwood Press 2026), Still Life with Sorrow & Joy (The Poetry Box 2026), The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press 2024), When All Else Fails (The Poetry Box 2023) and Overtures (Kelsay Books 2023). She’s also published Time Flash: Another Me, a romantic time travel novel. A sequel is in the works.
In her free Poem After Poem Newsletter Lana sends out a weekly poem she’s fallen in love by a variety of her favorite poets. She leads generative writing workshops in the Amherst method, helps poets assemble their own collections, facilitates a Poetry Community Book Club, and hosts the Poem After Poem Round Robin Poetry Reading Series.
Lana spends entirely too many hours watching crime dramas and viewing online tours of beautiful homes all over the world. She lives in Oregon on the unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people with her beloved husband and fur babies. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. Her favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
Above them, you fly up, dove-gray for miles.
Or so I imagine your end—escape velocity,
rocketing you from earth’s atmosphere back
into the volatile universe that birthed us, Brother,
that atom-less void before time ticked,
before water and wind kissed and made breath,
before the red sled of a fox treading ice,
before my Buddhist teacher, Jane, instructed me
that consciousness is a window seat in hell.
What is love but a squall of fog one hopes
never clears, a cautionary field of migrant
workers who rarely taste the fruits they labor over?
Are we more than stains on the never-ending
imagination of God? Tell me, Brother, what death
is not so I may taste these seeded clouds as seasoning
in life’s bitter broth, and the dreams I dream
for tomorrow may still amount to more than plague
crows plunging into earth’s Seven Seas.
I want to own the ocean, carry it inside me, soul of persistence,
engine of timelessness. Instead, I walk around, grief swirling
through my veins. Cut me and I bleed gray. No, you say,
impossible but fields of mustard inhabit the past. Somewhere
there’s a library from which all anatomy books have been stolen.
This year the lavender lost its scent and its way. The serenity of
salmon is the same river of their birth as their death. My neighbor
is building a new porch. Perhaps she’ll raise a swing to watch
sunsets, like the satisfaction of the second hand on a clock that
never stops circling. My father was partial to tapioca pudding
with, he requested,
enough whipped cream heaped on top to tickle
the clouds.
How can anyone define happiness better than that?