Jeff Harrison



A Visit to the Sleeper

Having moved from foot to headboard, I looked down the staircase that had been put in lieu of features. It was a few steps to the animal penned there. This is no fawn, I said, but a hart full-grown and minute. Taking him under my arm, I returned to bedside. Many steps from here, Fawn, I said, and it was many steps from bedside to the bedchamber floor where awaited the hounds, no less living counters, Fawn, I said, than you.




Artemis

Aerolith, no fallen star, you, Artemis, who failed to balance the hart that fell into the hounds.




Virginia Gallery

Virginia with her heel which faulty attentions would burst
           with her ship's surgeon brought ashore for the ride
           with her hand sounding this roster
           Virginia who heard the shot during her crawl uphill
Virginia with her inadmissible blot sold into darkness
           whose long-legged volunteering petrified them all
Virginia with her toenails waylaid by ruffians, Virginia who
           agrees with me that not everyone understands insouciance
Virginia with her covenant concluding her speech
           with her foil tip bustling up the haze of spite
           with her window erased five miles south
           with her horse insisting the crowd be waved away
Virginia high and dry like the tail of an unworldly person
           with her faint pandemonium quarried back around
           whose symptoms caught their breath once in the evasion's shade
Virginia with her non sequiturs crouched and rotted
           with her rigidly unremarkable canine teeth
           Virginia with Byrd at the South Pole
Virginia who might have envied the sob still ahead
           with her summit sounding like a Spanish doctor
Virginia limping through the pages to indicate sleepless purpose
           with her shovel pressed for answers twice daily
Virginia whose verse is too late for the fetus
           with her clay on all fours beneath her skirt
           with her blue sky movements feverishly across the lake
Virginia whose nerves are still staring out to sea
           with her uncommon constitution prepared for another midst
           with her perverse need for antiquated conveniences
           with her insinuation that lucidity is better at a distance
Virginia with her still-burning ordeal of abolitionist reserve
           with her hospitable inclusion of coordinate predicates
Virginia whose last twilight went in for a ten-year stretch




Jeff Harrison has poems in all the issues of Otoliths except the second issue. He has publications from Writers Forum, MAG Press, Persistencia Press, White Sky Books, and Furniture Press. He has e-books from Blazevox, xPress(ed), Argotist Ebooks, and Chalk Editions. His poetry has appeared in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II (Meritage Press), The Chained Hay(na)ku Project (Meritage Press), Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Dusie, MiPOesias, EXPLORINGfictions, EOAGH, and elsewhere. He has an interview blog with Allen Bramhall called Antic View.
 
 
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