Harness
BY HADARA BAR-NADAV
I take the word in my teeth and want to sever its hiss. Hard, harp, hit. Black leather strap or gravity’s heavy body, smothered in violet shade. Say it: shame. Blanket of fire that is my skin on a Sunday afternoon. Sunny out. Shivering and uncalm (alarm, alarm.) Cardinals unzipper the sky, making it fall by halves. Little knives I can feel each one.
When my father died on another continent, I did not see him in time. Black eye-shine. A series of strokes and a feeding tube—rasp of his voice high as a young girl’s. Dying into the fluorescent absence of no one there, its bright humming. Time was another day (day), another hour (our) over. Before and after, and then always after. Gray tilt of Sundays sliding sideways. Father all evening, strapped to the anchor, gone.
