L.R. Harvey Poetry

Foundation Dilemma  He knows that to really get  under the comforters and tidy up the bed- rock the house must  be stripped like sheets, the fitted one he has  worked so tirelessly to keep  cornered must be utterly de- paired: insulation from sheetrock,  sheetrock from studs,   patched pipes popping  from couplings like cut veins  till nothing remains but a soup  of sewage and what once was dry-   wall. And he’d pray for such a severing storm, even swing  himself the sledge, could he be sure the children  would emerge from the wreckage clear- eyed and assuring they understood how necessary the nightmare to such a crisp, unshakeable morning.

Monday After Easter Taking a break from taxes to pay  my civic duty, which is to say  amid the riotous red   of Azalea just how green  it all is around here,  I mean everywhere really  really green in every bracket  of being, like we live  lost in the overgrowth of God’s chest hair  and he is swelling up his biggest wind- fall  to sing summer. Can you  believe how close we are to the treasury, how non-deductible this life's employment?

The Tinkerer Pauses  Mid-way through the work he thinks how life’s a bag of chips and when you open it  mostly air. How the nothing he finds there only feeds  his craving for the deeper-in  where the crunch is kept, and past that where he suspects the crumbles bunch  in the corner, flavor-thick  with salt. How even here, the elemental stuck to his fingers, he still licks the world over like an ape for a flea. What is it he wants? A cold Sprite,  maybe, or just a gulp of what's  so full the thin bag of his lungs would surely burst, his soul fluttering out like a puff of white cheddar enough to set God's mouth watering.

Getting There All this weaving and wagging  like a wound-up metallic tail or a trailer bounced off its ball, your bald head  wrinkled against the glass  for a passing glimpse  of that great Ahead you hunger  for, that planet just past the of heat shimmer where  the burning in your lead foot  will be quenched at last  and all the beers sip cold  to the bottom of the can,  that North Georgia Eden with a hole in it the shape of your Dodge Ram into which you vanish somewhere beyond the black cloud   we linger in. I saw you just one other time, about five minutes later when we sat dead- still, side by side at the red light  on Battlefield, the unchanging one  that doesn’t seem to belong  but never asks what we think. We idled next to one another an eternity while over the shadow  of a pine-perched crow light broke both of our windshields.

The Tinkerer's Daughter Fixes Things      or, Learning to Pump Then after months of flopping around  she felt it, hope tightening  with her tummy as all 29 pounds and pigtails curved like a pink comma on the pollened page of air where she paused,   then flew forward like the latter half  of the thoughts that come barreling   from the class-five of her mouth in the car after school, so fast  she nearly snagged  her bare foot on the cloud’s  crab-claw, which no one saw—her father  in the shed, her mother flipping  sweet potato fries for dinner— so she climbed down   and ran to where the dog elongated in equinox light, leaned over to rest  her hands on the sun-warmed barrel  of his chest and shouted into his ear flopped like a cup to catch what bubbled there, Odie, I just learned how  to pump, to which didn’t jump up or howl his hooray but just lay  without reply, though she didn’t s...

What's Beneath Too long this linoleum languor.  Aren’t you tired of pretending tile curls  like the brittle crust of a chapped lip? You and I both know  if we could get a grip on the flap  of skin beneath the chin and clear the snag of nose our faces would snap off the scalp like a swimmer’s cap, then once we mopped up the place  we could really see eye to eye. We might find, like the time we moved the washer when it was time to move out  of Liberty St, that beneath you could press through the floor with a finger. You said shit like you meant it; I loved that. It cost us the whole of our security  deposit. Sure, it'll mean more than just the laminate but the quarter-round and base- boards, even the subfloor down to the joists, but we knew with this fixer-upper we were signing away choice.   And then for every sunk savings, every swift-swallowed dream, you hear things you can really plant a back foot on, like people finding original hard-...