Hadara Bar-Nadav

Saw

 

 

Hunger

was your first word

 

 

Born from dust and the whip

of wrists, you divided

and divided

 

 

Vibrating

along the line

 

 

Sun freckles burned

into your cheeks

 

 

With your unbroken

jaw and singular need

 

 

Devour the limb, the lamb,

the please

 

Kiss the hand

that sold you

 

 

Myth and monster,

machine of teeth

 

 

Rain-colored ghost

whose song is the whir

 

 

and was of aftering

 

Don't Forget Your Credit Cards

 

 

Ambulance. Call it. Don’t forget

your license, your credit cards, cut

 

 

your own wet gown of bandages, notify

your own damn family when you quit

 

 

your little heart, and the red light

slams blue, then blur, then geletal.

 

 

Close your own dreamhole,

smyth-sewn and tight. No

 

 

natter anymore, no choiring need

or milk-of-morphine cough. The end

 

 

continues though you are suited,

hulled, soon-to-be groom

 

 

wed to soil, beloved corpse

admiring the underside of grass.

biography

HADARA BAR-NADAV is the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (Saturnalia Books, 2013); 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.  Her chapbook, Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press, 2010), was awarded the Midwest Poets Series Award.  She is also co-author of the textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011).  Hadara is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.