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Articles by Jeffrey Harrison
Woodpecker
Issue 27, Issue 27 Poetry, Poetry By JEFFREY HARRISON At first I thought the pileated woodpecker that lifted up from the yard as we came home from a walk in the woods, flapping away on long black wings that curved up at the tips and flashed white underneath, might be a visitation from my father, who’d died that week ten years before.
The Story of a Box
By JEFFREY HARRISON “Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.” —Marcel Duchamp, Life magazine, 1952 For many years I hardly told anyone that my grandmother’s sister Teeny was married to Marcel Duchamp, and before that to Pierre Matisse, the art dealer son of Henri. Friends I’ve known all my life have stopped me in disbelief when these facts have come up in passing—a disbelief arising not from the facts themselves but from my never having shared them.
February 2021 Poetry Feature
Poems by REBECCA MORGAN FRANK, JEFFREY HARRISON, CALEB NOLEN, and ALEXANDRA WATSON.
Letter to America by Carol Alexander
Blue Calling Miles from Arizona’s creosote and prickly pear in the autumnscape of leaf over repointed brick the river’s scent reprises all fish scale and fume— though no field nor tractor in sight, I’ve lived where these were daily things, rudiments of morning’s muzzy walk. No jeweled grasshopper ravages lettuce or hay but eel-like sewers hum, clotted vowels restrung, tongue stumbling on the commonest nouns.
One Poem by Annie Woodford
Quiet as It’s Kept after Toni Morrison Rising Fawn Off the interstate, light shines through the clean plate glass windows of a McDonald’s, where a whole soccer teams sits, profiles pure flame. The country slumbers, a majesty of plastic, Thursday evening traffic. (The commute, the commute and then to bed soon.) Ellijay, Blue Jay as Quiet Bird A child with a cauliflower ear tilts his head closer, listening to his iPad.
Four Poems by Katrinka Moore
Adagio even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events – Carlo Rovelli These few acres once a homestead once ancient forest once scraped clear by ice- dragged stone Not being but becoming each boulder an adagio of dust A stand of second growth and waving fields of goldenrod cradle the little house nothing between us and wild yonder but a few sheltering gases The darkness out there not the emptiness we sense but an entity its own waving field Afternoon fades...
Mailboxes in Late Winter by Jeffrey Harrison
It’s a motley lot. A few still stand at attention like sentries at the ends of their driveways, but more lean askance as if they’d just received a blow to the head, and in fact they’ve received many, all winter, from jets of wet snow shooting off the curved, tapered blade of the plow. Some look wobbly, cocked at oddball angles or slumping forlornly on precariously listing posts. One box bows steeply forward, as if in disgrace, its door lolling sideways, unhinged.
Smokehouse by Jeffrey Harrison
Brick painted white on the outside, and inside blackened by smoke, windowless, it stood in the driveway’s circle as if central to our lives and not, as even in childhood we knew, the vestige of a long-gone epoch, post-bellum, now used only for storing rusty bicycles, old grills, tires worn smooth, chipped flower pots, bird feeders, shovels, rakes with bent prongs, red dented gas can, green hoses coiled like snakes.
Approaching Alahan by Jeffrey Harrison
They picked the harshest setting they could find, this mountain of rock and dirt where nothing grows but thistles and pines, and the only animals are lizards darting from behind the rocks, and cicadas—always heard but rarely seen. They chose the right place for asceticism. They also chose it for its closeness to heaven. Look, we’re as high as an airplane. And the plain below—the world—is veiled by haze, while we are in the clear blue rarefied air. Rarefied, but still a hundred degrees.
The harvest dance by Jeffrey Harrison
I took my despair out to the fields and stared hard at the sheaves of wheat scintillant in the sun, so yellow that flecks of the blue sky came down to dance among the spiky ears. Then I saw the sheaves were figures in yellow robes tied with a sash— that harvest gave the wheat a body, fashioning a population of deities from earth and sunlight.
The clearing by Jeffrey Harrison
I leave the trail, cut through the woods, and come to a bright clearing, its long grass luminous with dew and steaming—and everywhere, between the trees and bushes, spider webs, staring like weird translucent eyes (the spiders are the pupils). A rotten tree trunk waves a flag of mist as thick as smoke. Lichen, the gray snow of decay, splotches the scraggly branches of dead spruces. And a few dying maples and birches lean.
Enough by Jeffrey Harrison - Poems
When I saw the figure on the crown of the hill, high above the city, standing perfectly still against a sky so saturated with the late- afternoon, late-summer Pacific light that granules of it seemed to have come out of solution, like a fine precipitate of crystals hanging in the brightened air, I thought whoever it was standing up there must be experiencing some heightened state of being, or thinking—or its opposite, thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
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