Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
Blur
After the bombs
and the buildings blow
I call Clover, Clover
and you appear—
a dream limned in smoke.
Clover, my hermaphroditic dear,
I kiss your singed
leaflet ears and fawn
in a café in Eilat.
Clover sips from a demitasse.
Only a few sesame seeds left
and the porcelain carried away.
Morning crawls toward
afternoon, and the sun
says it’s time for wine
to drown this red day.
I hear there’s a crater
where our bed last lay
at the Hotel de Ruin.
A portrait of dancing
lights and fire balloons,
a painterly gasoline blur.
Let’s find a sailboat,
bread, zatar, and figs
and watch the distance burn.
Hadara Bar-Nadav
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)