Heidi Hart
The Emperor/No Clothes
I dream I don’t attend the opera,
The Emperor’s New Clothes:
nothing to wear. The wrong dress size.
No one has to tell me I’m all skin,
diminishment; the one who’s lied
to me is wincing all along the dream’s
edge as the dancers pass, black
sweaters, tights disguised as human
flesh; a Kafka character appears,
ripping the bedclothes from his father’s
bare and trembling legs; I wake
with a stomachache that lasts until
I breathe the lies away, out, out,
remembering the poet who once asked
how truth feels to the body and
answered herself, Cold, gorgeous wind …
Psyche’s Dream
Under May snow, body of a boy beaten to death
by his own stepfather; in a hospital in Tripoli,
a Dutch child breathes, oxygen-masked — the sole
survivor of a plane crash, wide awake and dreaming
shattered bones and green upholstery, TV screen,
cellphone, cloud. Last night I dreamed my own
plane crashed against the mountain where the four-
year-old was found this morning; did I live?
Am I still living now? Who chooses? Psyche stumbles
from the Underworld only to fall into a deadly
sleep. This afterlife, my silence, days spent reading
other people’s stories, hearing their survival
songs and gathering their deaths. I’d write a novel
in the margins of my own life if I could, unfinished,
home for secrets, all I overhear, the mystery unsolved …
Outside my window, the young man who’s walked
on crutches for a year is talking to his mother:
I am feeling strong again. I touch my shaken self,
unstable as a question mark, still vesperal
and trailing shades, and wish for this — to walk
the neighborhood in my own skin, bone-mended,
seen and heard, the box of beauty open in my hands.
Author Bio
Heidi Hart received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2000 and currently teaches creative writing at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Her published work includes the memoir Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice (University of Utah Press, 2004) and the four-poet collection Edge by Edge (Toadlily Press, 2007). She has received a Pushcart Prize for poetry, a Utah Arts Council Established Artist Grant, an Honorable Mention in the New Letters essay competition, and a Jentel Foundation Residency Award. Her poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Lumina, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Monkscript, Pilgrimage, Western Humanities Review, BrokenPlate, Ellipsis, Dialogue, CityArt, Irreantum, The Cortland Review, Friends Journal, The Salt Flats Annual, Northern Lights, Isotope, and qarrtsiluni.
