Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Fable of Flesh
after Giacometti’s Palace at 4 AM
At 4 AM the bells
swallow their keys
and a spine swings in its cage.
If the woman is a dream
what the spine dreams of
warm balcony at the top of the tongue,
how many rooms does she bring?
Stories hung about her neck
and waist like the iron weight
of a dowry. Hair tightly pulled
and a burlap dress, nevertheless
toothsome in shadows, statuesque.
The temple pauses on one foot
to listen to the deep between
breaths. Who knew a world
of crutches and stilts awaits,
a tilt just above sinking?
The palace hears branches
canticle in winter; the palace
longs for Avignon in spring.
The splintered aftermath—
an abstract of wood, glass,
wire, string, and a pair
of wings stretched and pinned
to the walls. Here we are flightless
but we are not alone here
we are so thin.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of five collections of poetry and two chapbooks, among them The Singing Pills (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2024), winner of the Levis Prize in Poetry; The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); *Lullaby (with Exit Sign) *(Saturnalia, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012); and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), which won the Margie Book Prize. Her chapbook, Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/GreenTower Press, 2010), was awarded the 2009 Midwest Poets Series Award. She is also co-author, with Michelle Boisseau, of Writing Poems, 8th edition (Pearson/Longman, 2011). Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, *The Kenyon Review, *Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. (updated 4/2023)