Kim Harvey
Facing Gladstone
Excerpt
Winter Solstice Incantation
Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold
paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore
and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black.
This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back
through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead
tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed,
what you were to me and a door slammed shut between
this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips
through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done
cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone.
Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold
paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore
and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black.
This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back
through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead
tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed,
what you were to me and a door slammed shut between
this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips
through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done
cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone.
About the Author
Kim Harvey is a queer poet, public servant, and proud dog mom from Richmond, Virginia who currently makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards. She is an alumni of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Napa Valley Poetry Conference. You can find her work in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, Comstock Review, Headline Poetry, Juke Joint Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Poets Reading the News, Prometheus Dreaming, Radar, Rattle, Raw Art Review, SWWIM, Typishly, trampset, and Wraparound South. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. Her poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: Smitten: This Is What Love Looks Like, Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change, and Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2017. Twitter: @kimharveypoet. Instagram: @luna_jack. Web: www.kimharvey.net.
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