Lana Hechtman Ayers

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.

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Still Life with Sorrow & Joy

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The Poetry Box

Cover art: Love Letters by Deborah DeWit
DeborahDeWit.com

Life is fleeting, death inevitable. Still Life with Sorrow & Joy contemplates death from myriad vantage points, including communication with those gone via letters or phone or from within the landscape of dreams, embracing the possibility of a forever connection between souls. These poems are infused with images of the cherished times spent with family and beloved pets—sweet, aching memories, as well as with images of nature’s bounty—the sublime night sky, the rush of waves, the patter of raindrops. The poet faces her own aging and mortality with a sense of acceptance, hope, and even humor. Perhaps death and what follows death will always remain somewhat of a mystery, but death’s dark shores can be illuminated and mapped, as they are in this collection, by thoughtful and heartfelt meditations, offering readers comfort and companionship as we all journey towards our great unknowable end.

Forgetting Needs No Forgiveness

When everyone who knows me is gone,
I will be well and truly gone, but for a few
short years after my body’s passing, I’ll be

a stranger’s familiar face on the crowded train
platform, wide forehead and button nose,

my beloved lavender cologne wafting in
on storm currents brewing from the east,

the idiosyncratic way a cashier twirls locks of hair
around pointer finger, forward, then back again,

a neighbor girl’s identically off-key rendition
of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” and that wee

tiny itch behind my husband’s ear, he scratches
slowly, forgetting what it was he wanted to recall,
will also be me, but he won’t ever know it.

Sky Over

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Cover art: Traveling Sky by Deborah DeWit
http://DeborahDewit.com

Sky Over explores a sister’s ache over the loss of her older brother, with a love that transcends their relationship troubled by growing up with an abusive mother. These poems were inspired by Patricia Fargnoli’s poem about clouds and the ephemeral nature of life, “Winter Sky Over Cheshire County, New Hampshire.” Sky Over’s twenty-one songs of grief travel back and forth through time as the regretful sister, who is addressing her long-gone brother and the ways they navigated their complicated circumstances, discovers exquisite hues of love and forgiveness that persist beyond the provinces of life and death. In the twenty-second and final poem, her brother speaks to her from death’s eternal now.

Contact Lana for invites to read from Sky Over (on Zoom) or to talk about Sky Over with your students or book club.

Noctilucent Clouds

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.