Hadara Bar-Nadav's book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (MARGIE IntuiT House, 2007) was chosen by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2005 MARGIE Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. Born in New York, she currently is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She lives in Kansas City, MO with her husband, the furniture designer Scott George Beattie.
Loosening the House
The typewriter is feminine in French.
I grow larger every day.
silently shrink in their sleep.
Porcelain bones, cartilage
abandoning their knees
and there go the ears and eyes.
I dream that they die
and think about them flatly.
My arms blast the windows,
my head ruptures the roof
(I crown the tight red sky).
A poodle licks my ankles;
ice tinkles, bells.
Her metal heart and chain
operatic in the metaphoric world.
There's death in the trees,
little ghosts of yawn and plastic.
Snakes in the leaf piles.
Milk leaking from the eaves.
Egg and Envy
To be chosen, perceived
singularly
against all those teeth,
millions of miles of want
muttered into the sky.
Desire, an illness:
one breaks,
one wins, twin
born without a twin
(one crushes, and lives).
Every voice, a hiss
with my name inside
and God in the rafters
hissing too. All my life
the chosen one, a lie
the great book told
along with floods,
doves, a plucked rib
and a woman converted
to salt. In Truth,
choking on it,
my clotted mouth,
my face a blanket of skin,
generic, unchosen, storyless.
Somewhere between anonymous
and hiss, hiss.
Hi Hadara,
Nice work.
Larry