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)