Author: Joshua Harmon

Joshua Harmon is the author of Scape, a book of poems, and Quinnehtukqut, a novel. Other poems from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie are published or forthcoming in Agni, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and Typo, and in "The Poughkeepsiad" & Sixteen Tableaux Poughkeepsiens, a chapbook from The Greying Ghost Press.

from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

The quiet streets of meth
dispensaries closed

for the holiday
weekend: blossom

of razorwire,
and the barbed hooks

of autumn-dried briers
it encloses: outfit

intelligence with such
defenses, the one

-two combo enough
is enough that need

not avert its spectacled
gaze from backyard

security spotlights,
from the unadorned

fluctuations of
morning TV:

from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Seed-flecked snow
and glacial night, curves

of scraped road: misgivings
athwart a guardrail, the blue

-black hour: we choose
the courtesy of suffering

our friends’ exile to
the men’s room’s engaging

tracts, a concrete life
inhabiting city spirits,

the polymered drift
of particulate winds,

a salted river: blinding ice
and trees, snow rags

and sky’s rags as, silvered,
the circle’s clipped:

birches break under
ice’s weight and that

of their own branches:
the full range of unspanned

spaces in view, a single staked
young maple: a wake

for understanding
the throes of subtlety,

the higher places of belief
and unused light