Three After Naomi Hartov, by Stefan Balan

Galaxy Girl, by Naomi Hartov (USA) contemporary. Click image for artist site.

Three Moons 
 
I know of a world with three moons, two of which are invisible, bouncing against the night's felted borders, yanking the masts in the harbours, the lonely palm trees, the dreams of teenagers. 

In the young florist's ankles, awash in dawn, or in the mailman's complicit smile when he hands you a package from Madagascar, or in the librarian's long fingers, not wanting to depart with the marbled, old book, it is everywhere: the three moons' disquietude, their irrational mathematics, the uninterrupted dialogue never repeating a word.  

Whoever lets his eyes listen finds it in the centipede's hesitations and, after the night's tide leaving the apartment, in his life's debris. It is at work everywhere, its mesmerism groping everyone, everyone reveling in it, unknowingly, like the moais facing the sun.

Only once was this world interrupted. Nobody survived it, so the story tells itself: only once, the three gravitations tangled, pulled, hurt, and snapped, making the moons, all three, collide. For what seemed an eternity, everything gasped. In the end, the world was reset, in non-REM; a blissful stupor reached all its corners, and, after a moment barely smelling of a rose, everything was erased.  

What followed was our beginning. The moons caromed, hurtling through nothing, plowing nothing with something, shooting a howling hole through the mountain of silence, putting a bullet hole of existence through non-existence.  

Eventually, what followed was us. You.  
​
I know of a world with three moons, two of which are invisible, where everyone bobs a lifetime of disquietude, unknowingly praying for a serenity, smelling, barely, of a rose.

From the Mouths of Babies, by Naomi Hartov (USA) contemporary

​The Keyhole

Was it a wound, a laceration, some sort of genitalia? 
Every time he came closer, the smell pushed him back.
It sometimes moved. Kind of breathed. Kind of blinked. 
Kind of coughed. 
Sputtered.
It sometimes sang, abruptly, in the middle of the night.
Most of the time, though, he forgot it was there. Until 
it would take off and drill the air, back and forth, 
farther and closer, like a fly. 
Like a bullet. 
 
Then one day it stopped.
 
Inside him.
 
He would cover it with a joke, with wit, with a boutonnière.
With doubt, with self-loathing, with acts of defiance 
that were taken for bravery.
He would cover it with a garden of irresistible pains.
With the tattoo of poetry. 
He would hide it with love.
 
He doesn't remember how or when he touched it. 
First with his hand 
(it was surprisingly smooth, patient, even docile), then
cheek, 
then the back of the nose, lips, slowly, wetly, until
he entrusted his eye.
 
He was received longingly, 
gingerly, 
like Leda.
 
They held hands.
 
It was so achingly beautiful it made him sad he waited so long. 
 
It would have been grieving if it hadn't been happiness. 
 

Biological Imperative, by Naomi Hartov (USA) contemporary

Obdormit
 
The tuning noise stops 
when he closes his eyes. 
 
Instead of music,  
what follows are crackles,  
gurgles, 
a warming  
radiator. 
 
Borborygmi 
through the pipes of the brain. 
 
Or maybe this is 
the music. 
 
And the swooping of images—a ladybug,  
mother, the Nile and its pyramids,  
the estranging mirror, snowing—is  
the ballet. 
 
Then the sponge cleans everything, 
smudgingly,  
like a blackboard. 
 
Falls off the chalk tray. 
 
From I 
 
to me. 
 
* 
 
Note: Obdormit is a Latin verb meaning "he/she/it falls asleep" 
 ​
Stefan Balan

Stefan Balan: "I am a Romanian-American poet living in the Greater Boston area. My writing career spans a twenty-year silence. At one end: my Romanian work—a book of poetry published at 30 and reissued by the Museum of Romanian Literature, and a co-authored a volume on Lars von. At the other: my English poetry, which has appeared in The Baltimore Review, West Branch, The Worcester Review, among others. In 2025 I was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Baltimore Review and was a finalist for the MĀNOA poetry contest. In 2024, I received 3rd Wednesday's first prize for poetry."