L.R. Harvey Poetry

Carnival, September 17 The tweed-suit men with cul-de-sacs of hair  stand glasses-down in mobile dating apps  while up above their children sway and swear they’re not locked in. Pink iridescent sap  from cotton candy trees goes sludging down  a pair of sticky cheeks, and somewhere in  the night the smoky call of the peep-show man summons a Gentile crowd to slip within  his temple’s inner curtain. Blue-green light  and thirty-second loops of carousel bells  are weaved into a luminescent blanket  that warms the autumn night, and all is well until the chemo-balding lady with the red bandana smashes in the glass-front box  that holds the smirking Zoltar, and bloody-fisted  grabs and twists his wired neck until the cops are called. 

behind and flanking either side The wheels are whispers on the twelve-mile stretch  of lightless lanes outside Atlanta. With trees  that flank like handrails, the dark conveyor belt  of two-lane freeway slurps him in the city’s  gaping maw of tapered skyline teeth.  Cresting a hill, the luminescent chicken pox  of tail lights spot his wrinkled face, and he  is eight again, his chicken-finger box  half-eaten in his lap, his half-baked mother behind the Cutlass’ wheel and telling him  “baby I'm your home” as they leave another  city shelter.     Eighteen, he bought a rig to roll the asphalt veins of states with signs  that promised Smiling Faces Beautiful Places or We Love Dreamers, but on a rural climb he’d seen an otel sign without the H  and cried because the symptoms clearly showed that it had somehow spread to everywhere. In truck-stop showers he scrubbed his body raw, but learned the dirt was deep enough that water was insufficient.

musings of a front-porch priest II. Some days, when creaking on the swing to watch the world, the wind is only wind and not a whispered prayer. Those days I do not catch the punchline of the squirrel’s chittered joke, or Ave Maria sung by white-robed choirs of cable-swaying doves. The wrinkled leaves are leaves that must be raked — they do not declare that life requires death, that sound must live with silence. Days like these, I pour a glass or two of discount sacrament to watch the madness of a wordless world flow mutely past.

musings of a front-porch priest I hope in heaven there are thunderstorms, the kind that coming cause a blue-egg sky to cloak the waiting world in mouse-skin gray. Tonight, the mottled robins out front all eye the soaking soil, anticipating worms they know must rise for air then scatter streets to punctuate the morning's pavement page. On bouncing branch, a blood-drop cardinal quakes    in spittled breeze as pinky-finger grubs go knuckling across the yard with rhythmic flex. They cork the cardinal’s yellow beak and plug his throat in a feathered flash of red. He breaks their jelly backs, then bloated, flutters back      to perch his limb. I hope that heaven is big — big enough to hold this holy wildness. - published in Eunoia Review

the farmer’s wife’s journal You cup my face with spindled hands to kiss my cheek, leaving red waxy love I wipe away. Your lacy robe ascends the steps with regal strides, a train of cream perfume billowing behind until you slip inside your door to climb your king-sized throne and settle in sleep. A child, I creep up stairs that creak just like your knees. The bathroom door is old, like everything else, and squeals to scare the cat. Blue chipping floor is tile-cold, but I have learned to dodge the slivers that cut a novice foot, a dance of sorts. A wisp of loose-robed white, I slide myself into the middle, right between the mirrors hung parallel above the facing shelves of perfume vials and toothpaste tubes, and watch my thin reflection bouncing back and forth in endless, smudgy images. The catch is that you cannot look yourself in the eye because you’ll block the view, but if you stand just right and twist, you’ll tunnel by on

Ecc. 6:11 * Sets down pen. * Sips coffee.

the street sweeper The cockroach of the interstate, he scurries on the walls of streets with feathered feet that whisper secrets of the night to sleeping asphalt. Perched above the road, he trains his eye to trace the shoulder’s curve, guiding his discus brush to swirl the line like ballerinas spinning on stage. Inside, the world is still. With callused hands he plays the screens and dials of the night-machine in well-learned, rhythmic patterns, and feels his mind detach to float out through the bug-stained windshield, dissipate into the city air and take him far from where his sweeper drones. The KJV in her lap, at night his Mimi used to clack her worn arthritic needles through the yarn, weaving him in tales of Saint Peter and John, who climbed the Mount and begged to set up camp—but they were told to go back down, she'd say, to work below, God's hands and feet. November chill has sniffed the cracks and slithers

the road behind the hill At 8:13, the solitary oak outside the kitchen window pulls down the sun with groping, fibrous fingers. Shadows stroke the stucco wall in stenciled lines, and on the counter, store-bought casserole is cold. His mother snores. He creaks the screened-in door to slide his bare feet over the concrete stoop in callous whispers. Outside, the evening air is soft as puppy’s breath. The grass is wet.        His mother’s face was wet the day his dad    had went away, wet Carolina sunset    streaks of red on cheeks that he had kissed.    John had moved in that year, a cheshire smile    from cheek to cheek that said “just call me dad,”    but whiskey fists can’t hide behind a smile.       Cicada song blankets his lilting stride across the lawn, his shuffle leaving strokes of green on cloth of dew. They sing him on his way out to the road to stand on top the yellow lines that split the street that splits the town in t