L.R. Harvey Poetry

BECOMING There really is so much you can do  with a high school diploma: make  a ramp for your matchbox cars, or get some brackets and hang it  on a wall as a shelf for jars of dry rice. It might make a nice  visor when the sun is out,  or propped up become a camp shelter  for a GI Joe to climb under when it rains. What it won’t make  is a home for someone of your  stature, or—try as you might to coax  it in the air—a magic carpet  to carry you there. No, it’s still this  body you’ll be living in, this soul  you’ll be dragging back and forth  across the commencement stage of your life until it finally learns that alma mater  means bounteous mother, in whom we’re never not being born.

GROCERIES A hot one for sure, the key into bliss of air conditioning a sharp pang in his pocket, but for all that  he stays sweating on the stoop,  veins thick as green beans as he leans and contorts his body, heroic under the strain of his refusal to admit that for all our late-afternoon grit, our penchant for one-trip wonders, what's worth troubling the table nearly always begs more than a bit of doubling back.

BECOMING                — for my sophomores (now seniors...) Till finally, after long years of waffling through the wardrobes in everyone else’s walk-ins,  and finding, yes, a good accessory or two, but nothing that fits you  with that it factor so evident  when draped over their bones,  you at last submit to return to your own, thin closet worse for wear, where— though  you can’t see it yourself, your back  turned—the mirror watches  as you slip into the skin that wraps you so right you thought you had nothing on.

FULL TABLE What to call this peculiar strain of ache, the fruit heavy of late and the evening light sagging to brush dew off the grass. Is an abundance  that hurts a sign of birth  or just a bad back, some other lack? Sure, the Big Chill is sure to visit soil even this far South, so I’m not, say, wishing  it would get here now , but when the flesh of those in other climes  is even now falling off the vine,  this full table feels dense  as a cross. Overstuffed  into hunger, I’m at a loss.

The Resistance For weeks now the old men rise  at the low purr of Cat machinery  and shuffle down their drives  to mingle by the mailbox, weaving kin and what women want as the county  digs up the road to lay a sewer line  they were fine without. Somewhere far from here, rat studies have shown  that if you isolate a sample from the control they will develop—out of sheer, sinewy resilience—an unstudied means of connection all their own, refusing to be silently disposed. Down at the mailbox stories click into place like the faded clichés on the church signs. So many things we don't know, but we've praved this way enough to say that if the world may yet be saved it will not be in a lab or at the end of a main road but in the slow, gravel communion of the left behind, right under the long nose of the developers in the language they forced on us and could never understand.

County Council Meeting: May 1st After the point-man for the Brownfield Grant  unearthed for us just how sick the soil  at Chickamauga’s shuttered Crystal Springs Mill, which is itself an Eden still  compared to the old steel plant in Rossville down the road, the County Development  Committee still had the nerve to request  that the rest of the 80-acre tract out back  of Lafayette’s Noble district be rezoned  as industrial turf— more jobs was the blurb.   In the 10 minutes cleared for neighbors  to defend what pasture they’ve made of their lives, Bobby Baker bleated  concerns about his 300-foot well as well  as his children, and Nina Gilstrap asked  where, with predominantly South-facing  wind, all that pollution was certain to blow.  But then the poison is slow, and as more  information must surely be gathered to adequately cloud our vision  before we make so rash a thing  as an obvious decision, the v...

TRANSPARENCIES Over the vacant green we draped a thin net of rivers, set the land rippling with names turning in on themselves like eddies. Mountains went over that,  ranges mapping the vast distance  between our desks and the thin air of all we had yet to know. Next  capital cities, migration pattern of native  species, crop rotation, annual rainfall,  dialects. During the test, though,  when all of it was layered together, piled on the late-afternoon hunger of our lives,  the only answer many of us could provide in the allotted time was that there’s a famine somewhere in the region whose borders we suddenly cannot seem to trace.