Life Harvester 31: First Ever Poetry Issue feat. Mya Spalter, Thera Webb, Ana Armengod, David Morse
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription via Paypal or on Patreon. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
EVERYONE’S FEELIN PRETTY IT’S HOTTER THAN JULY
Welcome to the first ever ALL POETRY issue of Life Harvester. I’ve asked four of my dearest friends to contribute poems and couldn’t be happier with the result. Not that I know from poetry, these could all be absolute garbaggio. The result I’m happy with is that I don't have to write an entire Harv this month. Happy birthday to: Sylvia Rivera, Pamela Anderson, June Jordan.
Note: the formatting of Dave’s poems is all wrong and I’ve been trying to correct it for literally five days and substack just doesn’t want to indiscriminately recognize indentations so I’m just sending out like this. If you want to see how they were supposed to look, email me and I’ll send you a pdf.
❖
MYA SPALTER
In Effigy
We built a proper fire and burned effigies
fashioned from twisted pages
of the rockaway eagle or maybe the bugle
two paper presidents burned on the good wood
we got from the stop and shop and schlepped
all the way to the shore
that night the tide tried something different
it didn’t go in or out for hours
just shuffling erasing its tracks
chewing its lips mumbling about something
naked feet in the flames like wieners on hobo sticks
the silence didn’t even feel like anything
so much as a cat yawning on and on
✸
An Ancient Ornament
I put my finger in the cat’s mouth
when he yawns to tame him
and to make me incrementally more wild
to the degree that he is a lion
glamour doesn’t just happen
you have to snatch it from the jaws of a cat before they close
you have to steal it righteously entitled like indiana jones
would do to some ancient ornament
glamor doesn’t just happen
you have to win it in a tournament
you have to have had star eyes for it from the beginning
even when you were a baby
glamor doesn’t even happen
to everyone in their lifetime
like growing moles on your back when you get old
you have to be lucky enough for it
✸
A Million Fields
I’ve lost my breath before over the poppies
take two steps away
the light is different on them
I forget sometimes that there’s a million fields
whole seasons this happens every year in
seeing in each one a blown out pupil
dilated so with love for me
I romanticize their existence until I get horny
for poppies much too badly
what does activity
want with me when it has bees
I'm a flower doing nothing
only generating myself from a full stop
into a chorus of glories
✸
An Epitaph
I’ve never been indifferent
for real never tried it
well okay once I dated a boy
and didn’t even love him
I almost saw what people see in it almost
but when when it ended nothing ended
the equation was redundant
net sum zero heartbreak even
no poems is bad math to me
✸
A Specimen
I’m star shook
like a soda exploded in light
made a mockery of my home sky
in high desert relief
I’m much too much trouble I tell myself in a dream
I need so much water and care and light
a special habitat terrarium
much too rare a specimen
❖
THERA WEBB
Ulysses Simpson Grant
State of the Union December 1, 1873
in a
vessel bearing our flag
we suffer
I am marking the
boundary
my fathers never
knew
under the flag
she was
so far
inhuman
and so far
without
a home.
✸
Warren G. Harding
State of the Union December 8, 1922
So many problems are calling
There is no acceptance
everyone craves everybody except himself
I am speaking of
our own people
carrying power and
rolling order
too frequently
we note the failure
of
the
Mindful
we face
to-morrow and we
can not pay
✸
George Bush, Sr.
State of the Union January 28, 1992
[Laughter]
[Laughter]
the history of man
died this year
in the world in my life in our lives
look homeward
The long rollcall, all the ones
we’ve put forth
ones who wrote “Kilroy was here” on the
walls of the German stalags those who left signs
in the Iraqi desert that said, “I saw Elvis.”
kids we’ve sent out into the world.
Tomorrow our children will go to school
But long, drawn-out
dread
was
when the war began
In this Chamber
you’re patriots
new
dazzling
smarter on this score
this evening
holding
everyone
at this hour
goes wrong, and they know
it
[Laughter]
Let’s be frank.
[Laughter]
my heart. And my aim
lack
[Laughter]
I burst
and break down
languishing
with pride
choice
is a burden
call upon
the moon
look hard
it is the miracle
that is this night
❖
ANA ARMENGOD
Indifferent to atonement
Im more interested in the parallels,
Of the spaces we inhabited.
And you can see them sit and linger on my
Cupid’s bow.
It was days of preoccupation,
My blind eyes, on the floors above,
Of the music below, my trembling hands.
Of all my hiding, all that goddamn hiding.
I would sit endless nights, legs crossed
Perched and uncomfortable.
Trying to understand and find myself
Within all the ands, and the what ifs.
And you just sat below, unaware, unaffected.
Without knowing me, in no need of redemption.
✸
I don’t know how to tell you
In a concise way
Unassuming and direct
How much you mean to me.
I am, my mom’s pain
My dad’s wandering
A beautiful disappointment.
Not for everyone to touch
But for everyone to try.
I am my own loneliness.
✸
Your tiny room, a wounded paradise,
Of a past you rather drown and
a future best left unknown.
What part of me is this?
You feel like something I lost
And I was yearning to find.
At 6 am on a Tuesday
I sit awake letting the sun bleed
through the thin.
But above all it’s the slumber,
one without fear,
with potential,
Of a couple of nights,
Of a few weeks,
Of where you’ve been
All along?
❖
DAVID MORSE
Inductive laws
of discrete personal
experience
the human body only sleeps
in 2.5 hour fits & this body is
designed to function overboard this body will stare itself
over cliffs in disbelief & this body will perform quiet subterfuge
even in dream you smell out the bloodstains
the room expands
including more death
undergoes massive cutbacks
at a quarter century,
The traitorous body. The butter knife
in the sink. My body first postures allergy
on itself before turning to yours
Trust is not a natural human
emotion
The academy agrees
world’s most beautiful sight
walking up
truck covered in still rain
✸
what if I tell it as small wild fable
my best nights keep everyone corralled away from us
not him, apart
was not of one a blackboard
I like tracing the Simian crease
where the hell is paradise
✸
Left hand again. Side the road, under the bank, like a cave.
The man and boy are asleep: a figure of time. Speech.
Coiled up, I hailed and they woke to tell me the name of the next village.
✸
Far after surpassing me in weight I carry Bud on my back
(still these days feel a distant dream)
when he telephones we work through a call and response
routine. He likes routine;
I like tenderness, humor,
as often as I lack for both.
✸
A distinctive characteristic
of the wideawake hat
is lowness of crown.
Place something inside
to keep it lifted
Not knowing what she warned against, I disregarded.
Not knowing where to go I have often disregarded.
✸
No matter.
I spy
my little hole
in the gate.
Deficits of speech
delivered.
Your love
will lead you on,
but you will
recover.
✸
I put the hate in
my pocket & as good luck
would have it, it turned out to be so.
❖
David Morse is a poet and bookseller living in Queens, NY. His latest book, UNDER MY FEET THE SKY, was released this year by Sacred Bones and Molasses Books and is available from either publisher.
Ana Armengod is a multidisciplinary artist born in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, MX, currently living in Braddokck PA. Her forthcoming book, 17 Years of Slumber, will be available this year from F.I.N.E. Editions.
Thera Webb is not a presidential simp. These poems are excerpted from a series of erasures of every State of the Union address. Her work is popular with sad Tumblr teens.
Mya Spalter is a writer and editor. Her nonfiction book Enchantments: A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self Possession (Random House, 2018) can be found just about anywhere you buy books. Her chapbook Crush Reactor (2019) is available courtesy of the author.
Colin Hagendorf is a transsexual Jewess and the editor of this newspaper. Her memoir Slice Harvester: A Memoir In Pizza was published by certified white devils Simon & Schuster and she BEGS you not to pay for it.