Poetry: Selections from Lindsay Hargrave

Virgo

I’m wondering at fullness

of heart under a virgin

sun and moon.

 

I have nothing

to harvest.

 

I am shrunken

head before

time, hatching

early.

 

Eggshells crunch

brown leaves.

We all shed

the dead things.

 

It hurts less

when it’s

unborn.

#NeverForget

In the beginning, there were M&Ms.

 

And you told me each point of matter was one piece of candy.

 

Many M&Ms create a tissue, a larger pointillism.

 

And M&Ms were fine until I found you uprooting potatoes, real ones, not candy, up from under your pillow.

 

I asked how they got there and you said you were sorry, they had always been growing, you weren’t sure how to tell me but you’ve been pulling potatoes for quite some time now.

 

I can see you’re embarrassed. Nothing quite like the impotency of too few teachable moments when caught with your fingers in the dirt.

 

So you baptize the potatoes with wine and cumin, neither of which are made from M&Ms, but you keep CNN on a low hum at all hours.

 

You raise the potatoes alongside your children.

 

The M&Ms are just an illusion at this point, an aphorism with no meat.

 

But to you, those potato eyes can see, and their impulses buzz with the years you remember;

 

You, who went to ground zero to snort dust and inhale fumes;

 

You, death oracle looking for your own reflection in twisted steel;

 

You, savior of poor tubers trapped beneath rubble, passive in the blue reporter glow;

 

You, drowner of sorrows in sugars;

 

Kissing buried root vegetables until your teeth are black with dirt.

And even when you pass out, the earth, somehow, remembers.

vermin in gold

There are kings in the silicon,

golden spoils in this pyramid;

they will survive the apocalypse

and the next one,

microscopically becoming

everything.

 

One watches from below the

division of empires:

The land returns to its people

The gold returns to its land

The refuse is the only coffin

he can cling to while the

birds shovel him out.

 

His kingdom once drilled

the water table for

its empire; into the ancestors

to distill the king.

A piece of him

poisoning and irreversible –

“Mine.”

barren

invisible

kingdom wears centuries

on for worms and shit,

they grow no richer,

eternal toxin

in our boneyard.

Lindsay Hargrave is a poet, one quarter of the improvised music group Oarsman, the author of a poetry column in the Philly Plain Dealer and a copywriter for Temple University. Proceeds from their debut chapbook ROT (2022) benefit ARC Southeast.