Telephone Pole
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Lightless beacon
who means the death
of green, its useless life.
Is my will to people?
Transmitting
war from house to house.
Chaos rips
through copper,
a haywire noose
tangled around my head.
I once held
the lips of a thousand
sleepy lovers
too far away to meet.
The world become
less strange.
Words for static
and soon.
Words for always
bitten in two.
Years of winter
splintered my throat.
The humming and
the humming.
Your missing
loves return to me
as ghosts with staples
in their mouths.
Drafty wings
on my wires notice me
only as a means
to solicit the sun.
When a man comes
with a drill, I am not
allowed to flinch
but the trembling
hasn’t stopped since
I was born.
– Hadara Bar-Nadav
***
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin, Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize from New Issues; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, awarded the Margie Book Prize. Her chapbook, Show Me Yours, was awarded the 2009 Midwest Poets Series Award. She is also co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th Edition. Recent awards include fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Hadara is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
