L.R. Harvey Poetry

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.