L.R. Harvey Poetry

Working Premise because know isn't the word for these gestures toward suggestions that our glimmering glimpse of a supposal might not be entirely un hinged. Take moths, for instance,  or trees. Can you see, before it tremors off beyond this margined periphery, what I mean? And if an Ash or Luna is gracious enough  to ruin your life by letting you smell  the perfumed fringe of their most secret  thought, there isn't much more declarative in answer other than yes , I half-guessed  as much, and it is wholly wholly wholly as it ought.

Returning All we want is a taste of what’s authentic: no artificial dyes or sweeteners,  no names too long to signify  real things content to bear the one- syllable simplicity of dust  to dust. You can imagine our confusion,  then, when after we’ve exhausted  our fortunes just to land a taste  of such organics on our plates,  we wake famished to find ourselves  faced with a hunger only quelled  by the heaping portions  of belief needed to sink our teeth in the grainy goodness of neon served  on the plastic plate of a Play-Doh feast.

We agreed the bush wasn’t  close to thriving there, and whatever it once was—forsythia, maybe?—was so inter- twined in honeysuckle and blackberry  we couldn’t even find just where  to start. The sun clipped along like the burning arc of a briar scratch before we stood back beside the looming mound of brush, after all that the bush still untouched and bedded just as deep. We knew then we'd need to keep at it far beyond the afternoon we'd set aside, the bulk of our work  what we once thought preliminary procedure, cutting away these perfumed veils   to trace the thick root of what it really is that needs months of unmitigated  warmth, or maybe just digging up.

Around and Around My tears won’t water this wasteland enough to grow sufficient food for even one bloated boy. T he right words slid in the right slots like a master- round of Connect-4 won’t keep even a single  student’s mom from calling it quits while he lines up a free kick  at an out-of-town tournament  in Arizona. These games we play,  carrying on because we must, because dust won’t do the dishes. Ashes, ashes,  we all fall down. I t' s where the song ends but not, we're told, the story, and we go on reading like there might be an appendix for what comes after: laughter, grass in our hair as all of us stand up again.

Grammar Mini-Lesson Love is. Subject-verb. Despite appearances, a complete thought. Implies existence. Love your neighbor. An independent clause about dependence, giving us, yes, pause  as we look for the subject hidden right in front of us and just to the left of “love,” like a neighbor.  Because love is nearing In one sense another thought that needs nothing, the way “because the train is nearing” doesn’t bear prolonged reflection  on syntax but decided action in getting off the tracks, or in this case on them.  In another, entirely dependent  on what comes after, so  therefore incomplete.  Please take your pencils  and fill in the blank. 

Christian Nationalists, Friday Night Down here we have the real ones,  like my friend’s co-worker, Justin, who told Chase to summon his troop of exiles while he called his cadre of men  for the chance at a kind of Southern  symposion, a Deep-South dialectic.  Their stance was largely foreign  to me, but I went for love of Chase and interest in the type of militant  hermeneutic maneuvers required  to mold Christ’s face to Washington’s,  pulling in about fifteen minutes late to about fifteen people milling around  a beer cooler in Justin’s backyard like Syrian women at a well. Knowing just one other, I shook hands and tried like hell to look the type who cared to remember their names while scanning  all the same for some sort of sign— a glint in the eye, a certain length of beard— to make clear who was here with my people  and who came from the other side.  I didn’t get very far before it was time and all of us were called to th...