Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
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Harvey
by OLLIE SMITH
One could tell from the nicotine stains on the jagged, red-bitten nails of his index fingers
that he suffered from insomniac nights in a bare room on a mattress with no frame,
nights fueled by a lethargy and an inertia so humming-still that they bordered on panic—
could tell from his gnawed, colorless lips, shredded to flakes from biting back suspected inanities,
that he had a mother who felt herself highly neglected.
There was a careless aunt somewhere in the mix, a henna-haired harpy
who brazenly breastfed her children until age six; she’d had an accusatory way
of watching him over the head of his feeding cousin, the same age as he was.
There was an uncle with mottled-red skin and psoriasis
who taught him dirty limericks about monkeys and French ladies;
at age twelve he found this uncle squat and dead on his grandmother’s padded toilet seat.
Right at this moment, he was thinking about the time his father came home from the hospital,
nineteen vital bones freshly healing after an accident involving ten dollars and a pint of malt liquor—
how his father, still painkiller-addled, pulled sheet after sheet of x-rays from a manila envelope,
taped them to the corresponding parts of his body and, brokenly crooning a vaudeville song,
danced around the kitchen in a suit made of his own broken bones.
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