h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

HADARA BAR-NADAV

MEET ME (BREATHLESS)

on the corner of sky and lamppost. I will look for you so wear your eyes. Wear your face that
has slept in curls. I will breathe the tulip scent of your neck and the sidewalk’s soot-lined snow.
Don’t forget to bring your delicate feet, those edible toes uncold in your oversized men’s boots.
I will comewith my hands holding bread—broad loves creased with rosemary. And I will come 
with wine, two plumy reds bearing bicycles, top hats, and names we cannot pronounce. Bring
your accordion mouth and your love of emptiness. Bring a fire and the wild nest of your neck.
Bring your open throat.

AMPLE AS THE EYE
(Title and italics adapted from Emily Dickinson)

is not. I see you in the mirror, nailhead, godhead. A shine so black. A task so small. Focus in
the dark. Do I expand, flexing for light? But am not conscious of it, this opening, closing. How
like breath you are, forgotten. The brain says go and you do. You become a window, refuse to
look away. See the ruined farmhouse made of moths and broken legs, the ruined frame through
which the world is failing. In my Chamber, a fading pupil, stranger to my sight. Shadows lit by
burning. At night, the dark turns red. Red glass, red moon, lashes rimmed in blood. A bath of
heat and wakefulness.

DUST IS THE ONLY SECRET

Tender father. Feather your face. Fingers laced with June. This waiting room white as always.
July. You were patient. August. Body of wilted springs. Part tissue. Part decay. Paralysis.
September, and the months drip. Patience. Pain. Infinite contain. Patient between 3 AM and
Tuesday. Between sponge bath and morphine. Between Warfarin and vomiting. Current, rubber,
hiccup, vex. The body lit up, needled, electric. You dream, half-life, half-lit. Machines chirp
metallic lullabies. A neon line blinks across a black screen. Pulse like a promise green and green
until the heart stops, sleeps.

RUIN IS FORMAL

Glassware (skin). Silverware (stitch). A crepe-thin blanket and your body disembodied beneath.
A white picnic. And you slowly rousing, strangely light, singular from this other sleep. Blousy
drips of iodine. Elemental Rust streaking your cheek. You recall a girl’s name from your life
before: Fannie (Fentanyl). Lori, Pam (Lorezapam). A girlhood ago. Girl in a gown. A dressing. 
Cast. Someone wound in clinical linen. Pupa. Spider’s catch. White ribbons a woman might
wear to hide her weeping face. A hole where absence pools. Lakes. Her lost eye in a 
somewhere sea, seeing nothing.