Poetry By Debora Lidov

William Alden CC




Cave

I squeeze through 
the eye of 
the needle, 
enter the 
ancient cave.
Here in the
ancient cave,
the chorus 
ancient-wails, 
“There’s only 
one brother. 
We’re all in 
love with the
brother.” My 
enemies 
enemies
forever, 
I enter. 
Complaining. 
Deranged. Will 
I find the 
fentanyl 
system that
fentanyl-
killed him?
Fentanyl 
King, laced the 
hapless hit. 
Fentanyl 
pawns, left him 
to die, left 
us, in love, 
to find him. 
Enemy 
basement, cave 
where he lay. 
Enemy 
stairway.
Enemy stairs. 
Infinite 
enemy stairs.




​
Door


One of us 
dreamed the dream.
That one called 
the other. 
The dream took
place in the
suburb of
the city
where we’d lived
as kids in
a red brick 
bungalow. 
The side of 
that house had
a small square
cupboard called
a “milk door,” 
where milkmen 
once left fresh
bottled milk.
But we in 
the nineteen
seventies,
used the door
for keeping
our ring of
emergency
spare keys. Then  
decades later, 
in twenty
twenty-one
just a few
weeks maybe
days before
he’d die so
suddenly,
one of us
dreamed the door  
and called up
the other
to ask if 
that door and
spare keys were
figments or
actual
memory.
“Actual
memory,”
answered the
other and 
made it real.



Debora Lidov’s poems have appeared in New York Quarterly,  Paris Review, Plume, Salamander, Tarpaulin Sky, The Yale Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Trance (FLP), and she lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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