Joan Harvey

Thaw

I want to say Hale-Bopp.

I want to say orange-tipped bush.

Beaver-chewed trees.

I want to watch the water move

In backwards eddies

Picking up skim from the sky.

But something comes up

In the muck

Someone finds the body caught

In the low tree branches

It doesn’t matter that it’s spring

Or it does –

Things are coming uncovered.

While you give birth,

Letting the DNA replicate

Strands twining into new life

Someone is sitting in the car

. . . you know . . .

Hooking up the exhaust hose.

Each new nerve hums.

The earth in spring

Softens

Waiting to hold us.

Joan Harvey's fiction and poetry have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, The Distillery, Artisan, Visions, West Wind Review, The Sixteenth Anthology, Fuel, 96 Inc., Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Worcester Review, Sliding Uteri, PO, the Santa Barbara Independent and several other journals. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and her work has been read on the radio in both Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and has translated the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, which appear under a separate cover in this issue. Danse Macabre welcomes Joan's industry and scholarship to our pages.

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