Hadara Bar-Nadav
Sheet
What contains
and cancels
the strange, still body.
Veil, shroud, shred.
Scratch of fabric
that roars.
Drape the mirrors
so you cannot see
your seeing,
so form disappears.
Pain of plain
linen.
Your eyes closed.
(My eyes closed.)
Cool cheek down
on the sheet (page),
color of a blizzard.
You will end all
of your days here
(I will end all
of my days here)
in this blinding god-
forsaken field.
What contains
and cancels
the strange, still body.
Veil, shroud, shred.
Scratch of fabric
that roars.
Drape the mirrors
so you cannot see
your seeing,
so form disappears.
Pain of plain
linen.
Your eyes closed.
(My eyes closed.)
Cool cheek down
on the sheet (page),
color of a blizzard.
You will end all
of your days here
(I will end all
of my days here)
in this blinding god-
forsaken field.
Sail
I used to live inside my father
now I live inside the (fragile) air
My head shifts too quickly quakes
against its thinking about shadows
My hand appears three times in various grisaille
(meaning pale blue sails and my shit-poor French)
When my father died my body fell
inside me, a crush of concrete
days of dust and buckling,
gravel-burned knees
And then came a turn, an inverse
pure paranoid balloon
I was flying up unmoored, unhooked
abandoned by gravity
flying up in my ice dress, ice skin
Breath of a corpse death sliding between
blood and flesh and flesh and wind
(nothing held me here)
Ice moon, a cheap dime in the sky
I touched its shiny fear
I used to live inside my father
now I live inside the (fragile) air
My head shifts too quickly quakes
against its thinking about shadows
My hand appears three times in various grisaille
(meaning pale blue sails and my shit-poor French)
When my father died my body fell
inside me, a crush of concrete
days of dust and buckling,
gravel-burned knees
And then came a turn, an inverse
pure paranoid balloon
I was flying up unmoored, unhooked
abandoned by gravity
flying up in my ice dress, ice skin
Breath of a corpse death sliding between
blood and flesh and flesh and wind
(nothing held me here)
Ice moon, a cheap dime in the sky
I touched its shiny fear
Hadara Bar-Nadav is a 2017 NEA Fellow in Poetry. Her newest book, The New Nudity, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2017. She is the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize. She has also authored two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize, and is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook, Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson/Longman, 2011). She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
