Kim Harvey

Self-Portrait as 1973

I am an Antarctic toothfish,
blissed-out and cash-strapped.

I swim through the moonroof
of your vanpool, slick with
triclosan, barbed as razor

wire, iridescent caudal fin
writhing, flutter-sleeved.

I taste like caipirinha:
lime, sugar, rum. I thrum
like a slurve sliding home.

I am a gamma-ray bursting
and collapsing in deep space.

You can freeze-fracture me.
You can closed-caption me.
You can fact-check me.

I am a factoid, an excimer laser
of deniability. I am ultraviolet.

I rise in-kind. I am done.
Fork-tender, fork-tongued.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Harvey is a queer SF Bay Area poet and an Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards. You can find her work in Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Poets Reading the News, Radar, Rattle, SWWIM, trampset and elsewhere. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. She has two microchaps forthcoming this summer from Kissing Dynamite Press and Ghost City Press. Follow her on Twitter: @kimharveypoet & Instagram: @luna_jack. Web: www.kimharvey.net.