Conifer—Prose Poems by Kolby Harvey

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by Kolby Harvey

CONIFER

I am talking about the wind in the trees, the pine shake dappled. Pockets of fog on the road at night after you pull a pheasant off the wall, a plucked duck out the freezer, laid out on the den’s bear rug tackle box. Hit a crow on the nose and the ducks tip under a metal washbasin. The dogs may eat too much if given the chance. Can we agree on this at least. That there’s too much iron in the water. An orange dome over the boiling pot, it’s best to puncture the film with a fork and let the pieces somersault through the dingy liquid.

I wish he’d talked to me about conifers.

Once he walked through a bed of needles and found a deer’s spine twisted, mushrooms dotted up between the vertebrae. Once I cupped the sprigs of hair on his shoulder blades in the curve of my nose. To say this happened is to say he loves him. That he is republican. To say only this.

Here we are touching in the kitchen: November tamarack against a field of spruce.

 

LESABRE

toes up against the part where the seat belt comes out of the hook down around that bend near holcomb road water beading on the windows like so much tupperwear—it’s wet out holler a name like Jerome over the empty road not Jerome but the name that means the name Jerome the spark of gasoline and lake water a root beer float a—you would stretch for that, a name like fleece, push all of yourself into the space between the back seat and windshield maybe he’d call you kitty or like you as much hairy ass against the glass like fat cake and a few dumb grizzlies—you like the slap of spokane against your face     the truth that no one’s ever   good as a gold oldsmobile.

 

 

kolbyKolby Harvey is into QUEER THEORY, graphic design and video games. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Birkensnake, DREGINALD and The Yoke, while his book reviews and articles have appeared in American Book Review and on Vannevar.net. He lives in Boulder, where he’s working toward his PhD in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance.

3 thoughts on “Conifer—Prose Poems by Kolby Harvey

  1. I am getting Lykke Li feels, which makes sense, because her music is so sensual and “Jerome” has special meaning to me. Your weaving of the queer into a heterosexist fantasy (at least for the “antagonist” in LESABRE) of some sinister figure into the queer fantasy of having a mere existence (when it comes to cisheterosexist eyes) is absolute brill.

    “you would stretch for that, a name like fleece, push all of yourself into the space between the back seat and windshield maybe he’d call you kitty or like you as much hairy ass against the glass like fat cake and a few dumb grizzlies”

    Brill. So erotic but also menacing. The next beat (literally) about Spokane hitting your face reminds one that the air and wind can be erotic, dancing into your hair, but also menacing, slapping you dead on with heat or cold. One is reminded of Carson’s “Eros, the Bittersweet,” and how a fantasy of the sexual really never touches what the erotic aims to accomplish–intense desire followed by a loss of control followed by a violent understanding that love can never be achieved, only pursued, cast off, or desired without completion.

    Also thank god for how you do/do not punctuate. The beats here are magic.

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