Kim Harvey

Sometimes I Imagine You Survived

I see you, not in the home where we grew
up, but in a one-room shack in the hollows

of Appalachia with a glimmering glass eye
that you refer to as your bauble, and you

wear a patch on the other side and read
the Bible in Braille, reciting scripture

to drifters and junkies and runaways,
all of which means your heart never

went to the stranger in New York
and he never had that last Christmas

with his kids before his body rejected it,
because somehow the bullets

ricocheted just right and you won
the pinball game of your life and it only

cost you your sight, is how you like to tell it,
stroking your long beard holding a walking

stick as we argue about God and you heat
split-pea soup in an iron pot over an open

flame after we walk your dogs, a Doberman
named Horse and a Great Dane you call

Danger, and whenever the clock shows 10:10,
the month and day you died, I silently

toast you with my second coffee; 10:10, our lives
separated by two red dots, not even a solid line,

just flickering points on a vertical plane
that we slip through from time to time.

________________________________________________________________________________________

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.