Rooftop Poetry Club - Nava Fader

Nava Fader

Bio:
Nava Fader, an elementary school librarian, attended SUNY at Buffalo's Poetics Program, writing her master's thesis on Adrienne Rich. She has been published in Nedge, Muse Apprentice Guild, FourSquare, The Seneca Review, Shampoo, Moria, Womb, and sidereality with poems forthcoming in Bird Dog and seconds.

Most of her poems begin with a line by somebody else. She is currently working (stealing) from Sylvia Plath.

Poems and reading on www.myspace.com/navafader.

Poems:

Shall we win at love or shall we lose (Frank O’Hara)

Shall we win at love or shall we love
shall we go daily to the bridge
shall we water the water
shall we make the most
of it A whole lot out of nothing a mountain where he jeepers me projectile
into the setting sun

And out of a rocket he came all fired up raring leaving
cuts of meat behind pink asses still smoking now scarred

shapes they’d try
to decipher you let em close

what he doesn’t understand por ejemplo: volume
the whole world is subtitled and he doesn’t
read or speak the language And must you rest here
where I am lying

here under the fig tree?

Let’s make it real. Don colanders
and Dona tinfoil
transmitters It’s cold
out here in space.

We have no experience:
Jesus or fishmongers. The aforementioned
shouldered bad
jerky and then discarded

mid journey? shall we bury it? speak
say will float say
move stone cure
what ails you
find it?

She wears our babies like brooches (Michael Longley)

spinneret coppice he was more spider
than man under the leather
boots gloves to the elbow hair
upon hairs tiniest the staying
power scopic scorpio his tail
weaving and wagging the way up

All this foretold. From my own side and paid
by my own copper (my father’s ladies
with scissors tucked behind an ear I think
they’ve lost a few pins sucked on
or tongues by their craft made
whistlers wishers the wisest
aren’t telling what they know

Hump of her my mam
who sold me
down the river kept talking
all the trip

can’t say here what’s found
in dungeons towers at the stake or drowned

Poor Helen she has conjured up embroidered sleeves silver tassel

without always this verge portion
thumbprint in the pie cutter
and this its astral projection.
Hard pensivity coffin
or key to those mutes skeleton key.

The bark of trees will finally
covey rainwater in its ridges
a collapsed perfume prize now dead
of carpenter ants and their enormous strengths.

The butcher block becomes
the kissing booth, and the rumor of the ruin
of her purse sunny beeswax
small tins of mints

is two yolks
for an encore gold
apricot the auks influence
ferning, her pleasure interior
décor de coup de grave de grace.

In her infancy, Helen grew
among the vines hard knot
of pea sweet and the jam shop
where they sell paving stones
and the legends of heaven.