L.R. Harvey Poetry

the garden girl of Willow Brook She presses down with nail and thumb then twists, feeling more than hearing the throaty pop of offspring separating from source. She doesn’t ask for much: a six-by-seven plot walled off with two-by-fours that she can call her own, a neatly planted row of rose, a line of daisy sprouts, between it all the musky scent of soil.                                     The neighbors know she’ll be there afternoons, a sort of monument to life in Willow Brook. The kids are told to look but not to touch the figure roped in the garden’s twine. I bet she bites, they joke. From small-town whispers their parents know the day she cracked.      She left that morning for the doctor in the city, her bloated belly holding the farm-bo...

from the top looking down He used to make up histories for him, stories that told of tragic accidents or unrequited love. Or how he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see and then had sought asylum in Boston streets, sharing his secret with the crackheads and the corner prostitutes who tell him “sweetie    I know it must be hard.”                                          Now none of it was true of course, but when you’re high up in your penthouse office suite, a hit of blow lining your cedar desk, the dread-locked man who digs the cans with dirt-caked claws below the overhang of the downtown Hilton Inn is better entertainment than another dose of internet porn.       He can’t imagine what it must be li...

on finding an eviction notice but we are young today, my dear, so let us dance — spinning to the sound of neighbors shouting upstairs, then pirouetting past the pile of unpaid bills that peer out smugly from their plastic window sills with urgent, time-stamped stares — let's laugh a laugh that resounds above the city sounds of taxicabs that pinball past in seedy streets below, a laugh that drowns the drone of evening news evaporating through the plastered walls too thin to block the mumbles of the neighbor's TV set: the traffic's clogged again on East Magnolia St — and then let's sing, my dear, let's sing the sort of song that takes the smoggy rain of weeping city skies [drumming the window-unit that hangs itself outside like wire-dangled sneakers] and turns it into tin-roof rain on farmhouse nights, a liquid lullaby to hush our streetlight minds and settle us both in sleep — and when we wa...

the painter's pain: laws of reflection Ever since she left his side to lie in a covered, colder bed, he found he could not mix his reds and yellows the way he had before, when he could summon suns to bounce off the canvas, filling rooms with light. They'd moved him down a couple floors to assisted living when she’d left, after some prodding from their daughter that he’d need help with daily things like baths, and he'd agreed to ring for Peggy when he needed to hold a hand down lobby stairs, but he had never thought his art would suffer loss of life. But now, as he holds his brush to caress the page like he was wont to do in the Bay St. house -- painting in the sun-filled room,   across the hall hearing her hum “This Little Light of Mine” to one of their napping children -- his fingers go     stiff, and angrily he douses                the canvas in ...

portrait of a poet writing the wrongs With steer-blank stares the bars' dead eyes look up to watch the flustered waitress, her greasy hair in coils on her flushing face. She stoops to pluck the pieces of ceramic strewn about in islands on a golden sea of IPA, and across the bar a woman moans about the service here, demands a drink that better be on the house. His pen  in hand he watches from his corner seat. He does not find it hard to write their wrongs:  to trace the shattered pint with ballpoint ink or write the lines of seedy nights that crawl   their way across the woman’s furrowed face —  he does not find it hard drag his pen across a jagged edge of all that’s chipped or cracked until his words are seeped in blood  and pulse on top the page. But words go still when all the world is right. Like Tuesday at the coffee shop, when they had brought his muffin on an egg-white plate — the nuts on top w...

A rainy day at Newman's Grounds The raindrops dribble down the shopfront panes while back behind the counter a barista drips her own creation in dappled earthenware cups. He's always liked the tables here, the way they're cut with thick pine tops and sturdy legs two inches thick, like they were made to last for longer than a coffee's caffeine buzz. Sipping his drink he drains the grainy dregs with sifting teeth, the neural background beat of study music pulsing in his ears. She used to sit here with him before the year when all went wrong, the year he found she'd met someone else she'd rather sit, and lie, with more than him. But he had kept on coming after his night-shift out of habit, drumming his fingers on the counter, perfecting the lie that she was busy with work—but now he'd get his coffee black.                         The rain was unexpected, but so was her leaving him, and though he'd suspected ...

the Dominican shortstop rounds third The smell of stale Bud Light and cigarettes festering beneath a mocking Memphis sun is not the smell of home. He swings to greet a 1-1 curve -- the number of state-side years it’s been since last he saw his wrinkled abuelita kneading the grainy corn tortillas he knows as well as Grady’s signs at third -- and stretches to beat the throw to first the way his tita Isabel would chase and beat him as a niño if he forgot to sweep the colmado out on Friday nights. A pimply high school student yells out something about frijoles while he re-ties his Nike spikes. He wonders whether the dusty, worn-out spot in Juan’s azúcar field where dark-skinned hitters rub the ground down thin with rhythmic practice cuts is still the holy grounds of hopeful praying prospects. The sound of "Summer of 69" fills up the park like Armstrong fills the zone on Friday nights,   and Bombers' fans cheer on th...