I envy that with the zippers on their jackets That made the most of their noses? Sister, Our American husbands didn’t have hamsters Their cradles, but they can do somersaults We just want him to understand the hose dribbling next to each tree, why I give you something and you take it from me. We’re not thinking “ta-da!”-flock of doves or drawbridge comma princess, but we do dream about his fingers unfurling like sea anemones.
If we could discover his diet, we’d remake his food with twice the butter and cream, sit back and wait until his ballooning belly forced his arms out and away from his body. No one has seen him eat, but we imagine him gnawing on the fruit of low-hanging branches, licking the leftover jello from the schoolchildren’s lunch trays. When the town committee put the most delicious cake (with glossy fondant and candied pansies) in front of No-Hands, he didn’t lunge for it, didn’t even lick his lips. The children are fearless-they’ll caress the two moles on the back of his right hand, bring their softest animals to rub past his bare ankles. He appeared long ago on the dustiest day. No-Hands has hands but he keeps them clenched in fists at his chest. (Oct.Today, The Poetry Section is pleased to deliver two new poems by Matthea Harvey, who lives in Brooklyn.
A few short, lineated poems punctuate the blocks of prose: “World, I'm no one/ to complain about you.” Harvey continues to match her unique sensibility with subjects that matter her poems are both empathic and delightful. The backbone of the collection is a pair of sequences-titled “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future”-that explore those two increasingly loaded words using a clever alphabetical system with surprisingly haunting results: “We were just a gumdrop on the grid.” Prose poems bookending the sequences present a fable about a lonely robot (“When Robo-Boy feels babyish, he has the option of really reverting”) a study of appetite (“Ma gave Dinna' Pig his name so that no-one would forget where that pig was headed”) an explanation of how the impossibility of mind-reading led to love (“Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way”) and an unlikely dinner ritual (“rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside”). The verse and prose poems of this third collection by Harvey is rife with her signature wit (“the factory puffs its own set of clouds”), darkened by an ominous sense of fearfulness in a post-9/11 world, which the poems' seeming levity tries to combat.
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