L.R. Harvey Poetry

in the self-help aisle of Barnes & Noble I ask him where to find a late-night bowl of mac-and-cheese (the kind that comes with powder), and he looks somewhat confused and inquires about the author’s name. I try again: Okay, I say, perhaps you’ll point me to a couple hours of Autumn on a mountain porch, with sky that’s punctuated by a rolling line of balding heads and wind-stripped birches where a nut-fat squirrel climbs to whisper secrets with his scraping claws. We have Twelve Rules for Life he says, or Taking Control of Diet , and asks me if I’ve heard of Carol Dweck.       He’s old, confused, I remind myself. One last exasperated try: Surely you have forks that slip through key-lime pie? The end-line of a poem? A shelf of wooden knick-knacks in a small-town antique shop? Firm grapes?                -published in Better Than Starbucks

yield sign, Broad St. and Highway 75 Yield: to the knuckly grease-nosed growth  that’s sprouting from his too-small Mazda seat,  red-faced, spitting a damning oath  upon my future grave? To the padding feet  that pace outside my locked cerebral doors,  promising that they will stay  on blow-up mattresses, that I will never even know they’re there? To days  I’m mill -stoned down to my bed,  blanketed in shadows I cannot lift  with flailing hands and feet? To death?  To life?

recalibrate Recalibrate with me,  so rain is rushing up in liquid beams while people pad across the wrinkled sea and sink in hills of grass. Dream that dreams are understood  as clearly as a mother’s touch,  and good and love and truth are much  too absolute to discuss  with any level of controversy. Let’s lie to sleep  on beds of paradox, at ease to rest between the sheets of sorrow-joy and other boths, and let us nod, acknowledging that a curvy bass-line in a blue-light bar can be the voice of god on Thursday nights.

at end of August The final week of August sighs  and summer slips into a coma, soft  and slow as infant dreams.        The left-hand turn on Main St. pulls a vagabonding leaf  across my hood, with Herculean effort  clinging to the dew-slick morning metal  to avoid a second fall.            Mailbox children work  their backpacks tight and try to tell themselves that seventh grade is good, and try to tell  themselves that growing up is good, and cram their apple air-pods deep to somehow quell  the siren song of childhood. How strange, how lovely, when heartstrings stretch while days  compress to pocket-fulls of sunlight, when all  the air is cloaked by the love-sick haze   of what can only be said by the Miles Davis solo  now seeping through my front-right speaker. 

state of confusion A dark green corduroy in August heat with pockets full of crying cubes in case it gets too hot. I squelch my sweating feet  in smart-wool socks, then split my covered toes through flip-flop thongs—it’s like cutting frozen butter with a plastic fork. Ear muffs fit quite well beneath the visor that I wear  as if I’m headed to the coast, and it  is bound to turn the roving eye when I slurp my peach martini from ski-gloved hands.      I once   jumbled up my brother’s Rubix cube  to make him mad, but it had only helped him solve it somehow. If I can twist myself enough, perhaps my knots will untangle themselves.

white spaces White spaces scare me:  Brand new notebook pads,  the hue of morning light, and breakfast plates without a smear— the blank replacement card in Bicycle poker decks, the empty space after a poem’s lines, and seven squares of unplanned week.  I do not trust myself  to realize their emptiness.        I far  prefer the parasitic company of poorly written fiction, noisy rooms where voices outshout thought, long restless nights  of Sabbath rest when Netflix series drum  their senseless beat behind my eyes to quiet  my fear of silence.      What is is far more safe  than what could be, and fruitless actualities  can never blossom seeds of death,  or life.  Fertile soil can foster both—they scare me, they call me, these white spaces.

I understand, Eve Holly bushes, fire, and baby birds, decorative tangerines, the fruit on top of cakes, a set of dirty words that taste good on my tongue, reddish berries I cannot name, the second hand on clocks without a cover, beautiful married women, my nephew's Lego set, my brother's rock collection, the soft spot on a baby's head.

a breakfast poem Eggs snatched from feathered beds and laid to rest  on white-hot mattresses, curling up  with pulls of my spatula, then blanketed in salt— I shovel a peppered fork-full of  abortions in my mouth.  Pigs sound a lot  like screaming children when you slit their throats.  I heard it once in Samaná: the lot  across the street was owned by Alvarrez  el porquero , and every dusty day  he’d wet the earth with blood— the bacon on  my plate lies sizzling with testimony.  A Guinea woman slips from sleep at dawn  and twists her hair with calloused thumbs. Again,   she’ll pluck the beans. At night, her pockets pennies   heavier, she dreams of rivers, men,  and other vibrant things she does not see in rows of cocoa. I sip her dark-roast sweat, refrigerator cooled with almond sweet-cream— nothing is free.             

Corner of Vine and Main —        the bachelorette lies still beside the toilet bowl, her groom  now dreaming strippers on her lap— the street  is still and dark as dirt, a siren sound  the only clue the night is yet alive,  and digging through my windshield three red eyes  sway hypnotically beneath the vine like snakes.      Bright candles in the chocolate night,  my headlights poke the darkness with a baby’s  fingers, searching for something,  something.