L.R. Harvey Poetry

Coming To Let’s pretend it really were like waking:  the dream rips at the seams and you slip out in a thin sheen  of sweat, bare feet pressed on reality’s floor. What's more, suppose all the bad things you did  you didn’t, the bad ones  they did undone. And remember that box which smelled of woodsmoke, held the sun, the one on waking you could never understand but stretched more than your hands for? weaves together— glass of water, ceiling fan, pants draped over desk— imagine  that , the flit of all those half-recalled faces  fixed. Let's pretend it was so.  For that, you’d be willing  to thrash a while yet  in these tangled sheets, no?   

The Shot The night before I told her  how it all would be okay. That afterwards we'd feast at Droop Scoop, where spoons of every color rattled in their cups, cheering her name. I told her  how it was needed to cast the sickness far away, was for her good. I didn’t say it  wouldn’t hurt because we both knew  it would. That morning I left for school, then Gracie called at the bell to testify  how she sat there on the sheet, legs dangling and anything but fine, tears mixing with snot  like vinegar and wine. But she turned her face away and took the shot.

Roadside How peculiar the curve of this  cabinet. My current house  could not accommodate  such a curve. Peculiar, too,  what makes us do what we do, like loading it in the back of the truck as if going home were no longer possible  without this curved cabinet. As if,  having once encountered such a singular curve, there’s no return  but to smash the walls and construct myself a place to receive such a soft assertion,  such grace. It was a Thursday,  and hear me when I say  my current state could not   accommodate such a curve,  but then when are we ready, ever, for the corner we turn?  

Backpack  The answer is the sum total  of mountains, maracas, and those ripe mangoes  a child laughs, smell of smoke  in a shirt and that mysterious flavor  Umami, best described  as asparagus. Plus everything else.  But the test has been misplaced, so—ever the students— we circle the fire  around and around, close  to the heat as we can bear,  wear all this knowing  with nowhere to put it down.

Path to the Fern Circle As so many times before the story led us  to the stack of stones we called a door, then down the steep descent  into the woods behind the house, leveling out at the fern circle,  that clearing where we usually found  whatever boon the story had sent us  looking for. But this time we soon  found the way choked with Joro spiders,   a non-native species with thick,  calculated webs, three-dimensional,  like air-cages built to snag  light itself. Ecologists say  the ecosystem will have to adapt,  but such integration takes years. So we could wait, or abandon  the place, or—though the only thing thicker is fear, and it sure won’t be fun— start killing them, one by one.    

The Wait The king’s been gone a time.  Of that there is no doubt.   Once again the pigs are out.  Once again we’ve killed the pigs  or slipped into their skin, plucked Laerte’s fruit  and called it fate or anything but sin.  If we cram the apple in our mouths  will it keep the truth  from spilling out?     The king’s been gone a time.  The whisper’s that he’s dead.  But Eumaeus, Philoetius,  Eurycleia—there are a few, still,  doing what they always did.