L.R. Harvey Poetry

World Straddling TDOT is expanding the I-24 I-75 split from Chattanooga to Atlanta, an extra lane  each way, and Gracie and I too have our afternoon say constructing possible directions we could bear  to ease our daily commute through the world. We love this little plot of land in rural Georgia, but there are times  we’d be happy to exchange some hey deer  for hey there’s as neighbors nose by  with strollers, chatting loose and free  as all the free money Tennessee is rolling out  to attend private school, like the one  at which I teach and where our kids  will likely be. But then, of course,  there’s the peach trees to weigh in the scales, the troubling question of why we can't be comfortable in the long afternoon silence of ourselves, Emmie’s excitement  to begin preschool at the baptist church we don’t attend but would gladly be dunked in the honey dripping from that twang.  More state and property taxes  here, less ro...

Palm to Pay Deemed nigh neanderthal to dig  into a purse or pocket for the plastic long since replacing the paper so clumsy to unclamp and then—by all  accounts—to count , now the red line reads like an oracle the pathways   of our palms, foretelling not a future but a number unlocking the numbers to our name. We file through  with our bags all the same, each feigning awe at this newest audacity, like so  many deferring fathers who never dared a word  to the boy in the house whispering  words to his daughter, but who were certain, come Monday, to big-mouth about the sheer disrespect of stepping into the living room  to find that tousled head canoodling with his princess on the lazy  chair, bare feet kicked up on the table which didn't feel the need to jump a bit at being caught in the act of defiling his very flesh.

  Hypothetically Speaking The richest yield the garden bore was before  you soiled it with seed, before the natives  became weeds because you didn’t plant them  there and the fence was stacked  in lumber racks at the hardware store  with potential still for perfectly plumb.  Your significant other, too, kept their figure  firm as a fresh cucumber twenty years  into your marriage before you met  them, their priorities in prim rows  well-tilled and running parallel to your own. The summers there were never oppressively hot, the spouses most certainly were, and the houses rarely  needed repair, till you— your very real  body with its very real hunger tiptoeing for the glint of it all at the top  of the trellis—found the cardinal’s nest among other tangles on which matter insists.

Just Visiting At this shore the pelicans know  better than to bat against the billow,  their stillness less despair than consent to be carried  there at odd angles like tired toddlers or a flock of bald tires scudding silent over the sea's black ice. Is not our slippery way  with words, this endless appetite for a local joint or a roadside map enough to make clear we’re not from around here?    Just look at how unmoored in a head- wind, how hard we insist to flap to ensure we're going nowhere further than the nowhere we set out for.

A Very Real Intelligence No one knows which ship stowed the hammerhead worm in its hold,  but no one either need be told  there’s been a certain, sinister shift in the soil, a culprit dicy to detect as the stick sprawled across the trail that suddenly proves less twig  than tail. On the receiving end  of allegations of hollow stem  and root rot, the hammerhead chooses not to comment  on the wreck, keeping hypothetical hands clean as it feeds instead  on the ones in the thick of working unseen to keep the garden fed. “What’s all the fuss about?”  it choruses from both sides of both mouths, and in the heat of the day we find ourselves with half a mind to agree it couldn’t hurt to lean the shovel  against the shed, slip off our gum boots and massage our bruised heals.  I mean for real, did we think we'd be the ones to crush its head?

The Prophets Say the Road the Seers See but then there are those of us who best know our knowing  as the glob stuck deep in the chest  or the kernel wedged back a ways between the wisdom  teeth, who cannot cough it up or condescend to choke it down  but must instead live out  the slow wheeze of our days  with the constant scratch  of an asterisk to a footnote  only read with the feet.