Cinderella by Bernard Horn

You need another wedding dress
for the August heat of Israel, so you’re in the TJMaxx
dressing room alone, trying a simple pale gray gown
that hangs on your body, Linda will say
later, with the line of archaic statues of Artemis,

and hisses of whispers lift up your eyes and turn them
from the full-length mirror to a pair of three-year-old girls
and their mothers, there, standing at the far end
of the room, and you can just discern
one of the mothers saying, “Well,

you’ll just have to ask her,” as both
of the women lightly nudge their daughters
forward, towards you, and the two girls approach
and say, “Are you Cinderella?”
as one of the mothers mouths,
“Say yes,” which you do.

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Bernard Horn’s Our Daily Words, winner of the Old Seventy Creek Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the 2011 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His translations from the Hebrew of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. His poems have been featured in the 2015 anthology, Devouring the Green: Anthology of New Writing, The Mississippi Review, Writer’s Almanac on NPR, and the New York Times Metropolitan Diary. One poem was used to commemorate 9/11 on huffingtonpost.com, and another was a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2016 Poetry Prize. He is the author of Facing the Fires: Conversations with A. B. Yehoshua, the only book in English about Israel’s pre-eminent novelist.

Photo: Mahdi Fathi