• Purchase
Witness Magazine
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Saṃsāra
    • Archive
      • Past Issues
      • Fiction
      • Nonfiction
      • Poetry
      • Photography
  • About
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
  • Order/Subscribe
  • Submit
  • Search

Touchless Entry

By Witness Magazine
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2

by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Everyone is alive somehow
mowing dead grass and fighting
pizza boxes into a recycling bin.

Things don’t fit right or
is that me descending
a staircase, splintering apart beneath 

the morning’s blowtorch sun.
Bare feet on rough concrete,
a parade of black ants crawling

through the cracks. Oak trees thrash
and sigh—their gorgeous heads
on fire. I am pharmaceuticaled,

squinting into the golden gallop
of blown leaves. The wind
chimes glitter and swing across

our quarantined boundaries:
you in your box, I in mine.
We haven’t smiled in weeks.

Shall I play the blond gamine
or the sad, googly-eyed freak?
By the time I decide, you’ve turned

away, missed my blurry lorazepam
cameo, my slept-in athleisure
smeared with toothpaste. I can’t see well

without my glasses on, how soft
the world has become, edgeless
from a distance. I can almost dip

my finger inside the oil slick
of this viscous mirage. I can
almost taste the beer-scented sweat

of my neighbor’s neck, and pang
lonely deep for the lost time
of touch—how close we used to be.

 

 


Hadara Bar-NadavHadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and other honors. Her award-winning books include The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; 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. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011). She is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Website: hadarabar.com

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.

Mailing List

Sign up for the Witness email newsletter.



Order & Subscribe

Subscribe to Witness magazine or order individual issues.

Purchase

Submit Your Work

Entries accepted in the fall for the print issue. Check for online issue dates in the link below.

Learn More

© 2006-2020 Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy

  • The Black Mountain Institute
  • UNLV
  • Submit
  • Subscribe
  • Order Issues
  • Contact Us