Just admit you’re addicted to dog tranquilizers like everyone else
This post is your brain on Harper Galvin
Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from some artists who've earned our respect and affection.
There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.
This week, we’re proud to share a “then and now” selection of six poems from the too-rare-to-die-in-a-horrible-bike-accident brain of the superlative Harper Galvin. The first three are taken from Galvin’s offensively out-of-print collection The Three Einsteins (2014, Poor Claudia), while the latter three are seeing the light for the first time here at Discordia. Enjoy!
THINGS THAT AREN’T REAL
Sometimes I think you’re inventing drugs in order to pad your list of your addictions. You need to stop insisting on the existence of things that aren’t real. The pathologically high value you place on my concern makes me feel like a grandmother, and not just your grandmother, but everyone’s grandmother. Exhausted by the constant rocking chair-sitting, storytelling, and baking of cookies, my depth perception is affected to the point where I try to grab objects in the distance using only two fingers because I think they are tiny. Just admit you’re addicted to dog tranquilizers like everyone else. (2014)
IT WAS ALL I COULD DO NOT TO TAKE EVERY CHRISTMAS DECORATION FROM THE FREE TABLE
I guess it wasn’t all I could do—I was still breathing—
wearing three decrepit plastic wreaths, I walked to the park
where some teenagers in Navajo print T-shirts
smoked and said “There might be people out there
doing exactly what we’re doing,”
and my breath felt as geological as a petrified log’s.
The teenagers were also like petrified logs,
but more in the sense that rocks have
no idea whether or not they’re monuments.
“More fucking Christmas decorations,”
You say once you find me in the dark, by the slide
and I kiss the old pale scars on your forearm,
three horizontal and one vertical. (2014)YOUR HAND IN SPACE
Your accidentally photocopied hand in the dark margin of an article made me like the photocopy, and then the whole room, and then everything else. When I lived by a train yard, I sometimes wanted to jump on a random train and ride it as far as it would go. This was stupid, because if the train didn’t cut my legs off, it would probably end up in Pittsburgh. If my hands looked like yours did in the photocopy, I think I would at least know where I wanted the train to go. Your hand floated in space with the white specks in the toner, your fingers actually touching the words on the page. (2014)
THE ARISTOCRATS
The perfume of rain on the grass in the cemetery in May, as I walk by listening to “We Want Some Pussy” by 2 Live Crew, is like one of those scenarios ancient Chinese aristocrats contrived to inspire a perfect haiku, such as eating a nectarine while boiling an adversary to death. Bob Sagat wrote a version of that classic joke, “The Aristocrats” in which one of the aristocrats flattens his cock and shapes it into a functional xylophone. That’s a different kind of aristocrat. The same way the cemetery is different when it rains on a spring morning than when someone sculpts their body into musical instruments there. I am sexually excited by things that are different from each other, and that’s why I haven’t killed myself yet. (2026)
WHERE WORMS COME FROM
The most magical part of my childhood was when my dad took me out at night to catch worms in the yard. I knew that Santa brought presents because kids at school told me so, but since no one talked about worms, their powers seemed potentially limitless. Santa didn’t come out of a hole in the ground every night to mate with other Santas, which also made him inferior to worms. Now I always tell kids that he does, because they will find out their parents bring the presents on Christmas long before they confirm that I’m the one who digs all those holes. (2026)
CROCUSES ARE MY FAVORITE FLOWER
Because they’re the first
to get sick of winter’s bullshit.
Winter, in its assortment of outfits
referencing every romantic song and movie,
that longing as if you could eat an elegantly nostalgic hat
promise of family followed by the presence of family.
A department store display of glittering tinsel and perishable liqueurs
that by January is a discounted bin
of talking toys with distressingly malfunctioning voice boxes
and stale candy in shapes that symbolize things
that you shouldn’t be able to taste, though you do
like how an abstraction shouldn’t be an autonomous being,
a person on the horizon who’s always receding.
Maybe the opposite of a lie is a color occurring in nature.
Crocuses bloom on the world’s frost-grayed traffic islands
like the reflection of sunlight on water
fisting a half-inflated lawn ornament. (2026)HARPER GALVIN is the author of *The Three Einsteins*, *Ugly Time*, and *If What We Are Doing is Dancing* (forthcoming 2027.) Harper has both jumped out of and fallen into coffins at readings and once ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for eight years. They were commissioned to write a poem for permanent installation at Seattle’s Town Hall, but the first payment they received for a poem was two cans of an off-brand Sparks-adjacent drink called Tilt. 
Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.
Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).
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