L.R. Harvey Poetry

why G.S. Hurst invented the touch screen The sign reads ‘look but do not touch’  where flocks of backpacked students drift  afloat behind the docent’s wake of practiced words— ‘Look at the way the artist’s brush  lays heavy strokes,’ and someone slips their iPhone out while junk-drawer pens take  notes on colored pads that come in packs of three. A whiff of day-old deli meat mom stuffed inside a bag keeps pace behind  the shuffling group  as if it doesn’t want to miss  a word, and Mrs. Baker huffs when someone asks if there is time  to see the gift shop after lunch. With flip-flopped feet  they clap their way back to the bus  to talk about the pastel boobs they saw, the fat lady with purple pants, the fleet  of naked marble men lined up  in shameless undress, to soon  forget it all except  the 'look but do not touch' that's chiseled like the David in th...

the businessman and the busker The note is cool and wide and he is floating in it, lost within its current that guides him down its gentle bends and curves, a bobbing blue-suit boat in string-plucked stream, to wind his way down minor falls and major strains until he comes to rest in stagnant pools of his soul, untouched for years— the way his mother’s floured hands  had held his face through tears,  caressed his fractured leg  and whispered something to the night he couldn’t hear but felt  as soft as kisses on  his skin—the night his father’s father  stood naked in the storm until they led him back  inside, where there he swore he heard Amelia’s voice in cracks of summer thunder; they’d placed him in a home—his uncle Ned,  his mind a twisted root  of dementia, standing beneath  the alder tree that leaned its leafy  head out on the roof, for hours speaking words  tha...

breakthrough, Niagara Falls A flowing beard of grey-white water weeps its hoary way down slopes  that no one but itself can see. The spray  is thick, the foggy cape  the world feigns to wear on poolside days when chlorine eyes will haze the world in white. The man with the Yankee’s hat  pulls tight his poncho’s strap,  cocooning in to keep the droplets out,  while nervous mothers shout  at boys who lean out on the ferry rails to test their pluck and stare down in the sucking, frothing maw. Clicks of cameras rain down thick  as shirts that boast you'll find me at the falls!, and somewhere in the back  a woman raises skyward hands and weeps,  prostrate on her knees to worship what she cannot seem to say but stands her hair on end. 

the archetypes don't apply The night-tossed pile of crinkled paperbacks  don’t guide him through the cold-light labyrinth  of cobalt halls at Lufton Middle. That stack  of illustrated books with muscled men  and swords that ooze of goblin blood seem worlds  away from where a backpacked boy creeps toward the light-lined dungeon door of Mrs. Marlow’s  room, where sweating sixth-grade boys are stored in hard-backed cells until the third-block bell unlocks the grated door. They do not tell  him how to navigate the siren songs of 8th-grade girls reclining in the hall  beside the water fountain, who wink despite the water in their bloodshot eyes that tells  of virgin cigarettes; or how to fight  the armored warriors from the realm of white-striped astroturf who come invade the locker room with bawdy battle-shouts, then force his tousled sacrificial head down deep into the porcelain Charybdis; and w...

Carnival, September 17 The tweed-suit men with cul-de-sacs of hair  stand glasses-down in mobile dating apps  while up above their children sway and swear they’re not locked in. Pink iridescent sap  from cotton candy trees goes sludging down  a pair of sticky cheeks, and somewhere in  the night the smoky call of the peep-show man summons a Gentile crowd to slip within  his temple’s inner curtain. Blue-green light  and thirty-second loops of carousel bells  are weaved into a luminescent blanket  that warms the autumn night, and all is well until the chemo-balding lady with the red bandana smashes in the glass-front box  that holds the smirking Zoltar, and bloody-fisted  grabs and twists his wired neck until the cops are called. 

behind and flanking either side The wheels are whispers on the twelve-mile stretch  of lightless lanes outside Atlanta. With trees  that flank like handrails, the dark conveyor belt  of two-lane freeway slurps him in the city’s  gaping maw of tapered skyline teeth.  Cresting a hill, the luminescent chicken pox  of tail lights spot his wrinkled face, and he  is eight again, his chicken-finger box  half-eaten in his lap, his half-baked mother behind the Cutlass’ wheel and telling him  “baby I'm your home” as they leave another  city shelter.     Eighteen, he bought a rig to roll the asphalt veins of states with signs  that promised Smiling Faces Beautiful Places or We Love Dreamers, but on a rural climb he’d seen an otel sign without the H  and cried because the symptoms clearly showed that it had somehow spread to everywhere. In truck-stop showers he scrubbed his body ...

musings of a front-porch priest II. Some days, when creaking on the swing to watch the world, the wind is only wind and not a whispered prayer. Those days I do not catch the punchline of the squirrel’s chittered joke, or Ave Maria sung by white-robed choirs of cable-swaying doves. The wrinkled leaves are leaves that must be raked — they do not declare that life requires death, that sound must live with silence. Days like these, I pour a glass or two of discount sacrament to watch the madness of a wordless world flow mutely past.

musings of a front-porch priest I hope in heaven there are thunderstorms, the kind that coming cause a blue-egg sky to cloak the waiting world in mouse-skin gray. Tonight, the mottled robins out front all eye the soaking soil, anticipating worms they know must rise for air then scatter streets to punctuate the morning's pavement page. On bouncing branch, a blood-drop cardinal quakes    in spittled breeze as pinky-finger grubs go knuckling across the yard with rhythmic flex. They cork the cardinal’s yellow beak and plug his throat in a feathered flash of red. He breaks their jelly backs, then bloated, flutters back      to perch his limb. I hope that heaven is big — big enough to hold this holy wildness. - published in Eunoia Review

the farmer’s wife’s journal You cup my face with spindled hands to kiss my cheek, leaving red waxy love I wipe away. Your lacy robe ascends the steps with regal strides, a train of cream perfume billowing behind until you slip inside your door to climb your king-sized throne and settle in sleep. A child, I creep up stairs that creak just like your knees. The bathroom door is old, like everything else, and squeals to scare the cat. Blue chipping floor is tile-cold, but I have learned to dodge the slivers that cut a novice foot, a dance of sorts. A wisp of loose-robed white, I slide myself into the middle, right between the mirrors hung parallel above the facing shelves of perfume vials and toothpaste tubes, and watch my thin reflection bouncing back and forth in endless, smudgy images. The catch is that you cannot look yourself in the eye because you’ll block the view, but if you stand just right and twist, you’ll tunnel by on...

the street sweeper The cockroach of the interstate, he scurries on the walls of streets with feathered feet that whisper secrets of the night to sleeping asphalt. Perched above the road, he trains his eye to trace the shoulder’s curve, guiding his discus brush to swirl the line like ballerinas spinning on stage. Inside, the world is still. With callused hands he plays the screens and dials of the night-machine in well-learned, rhythmic patterns, and feels his mind detach to float out through the bug-stained windshield, dissipate into the city air and take him far from where his sweeper drones. The KJV in her lap, at night his Mimi used to clack her worn arthritic needles through the yarn, weaving him in tales of Saint Peter and John, who climbed the Mount and begged to set up camp—but they were told to go back down, she'd say, to work below, God's hands and feet. November chill has sniffed the cracks and slithers ...