The Light Becomes Us

poems by

Colleen S. Harris

~ 90 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: May/June 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

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Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, other poetry collections include Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014). She co-edited Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets (McFarland, 2016) and Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching (McFarland, 2012). Harris grew up on Long Island, and as an academic librarian has made her home in places including Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, California, and Texas.

Colleen Harris’s volume of poetry reveals her as a poet of the in-between, beginning with the title. It moves between two ways of reading it. Within the rich stream of themes, the power of the between shines through between love and violence, ifs and thens, spirit and flesh, caresses and collisions, past and future, mother and daughter, father and daughter, grief and grace. Colleen is a poet of wonder. ~Dennis Slattery

Colleen Harris sings of the vicissitudes of love—the heady highs and dull lows of love found and then, for good reason, walked away from—“I’ve misplaced my joy,” the poet says—all set against the steady thrum of daily life’s demands and pleasures. In these compelling and potent poems, the poet earns the right to declare, “I am weary/of all my drowning./I will keep my breath for myself.” ~Andrew Hudgins

We need poems that tell family stories just for the joy and sorrow of them, for the “shiver and proof of life.” In Colleen Harris’s narrative poetic sequence The Light Becomes Us, we follow an American family’s trajectory of first love, commitment, child-rearing, spousal abuse, justice, and acceptance. If these well-made poems were adapted to film, the camera would catch alternating degrees of sunlight and haunting darkness. A sometimes clear, sometimes gritty guitar soundtrack would paint the emotions of the young daughter, the mother, and the ultimate survivor. – Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller

Some Assembly Required

You, off doing real work to pay the bills,
and me, surrounded by an army of
wood pieces and screws, directions a map
of a strange country of strict measurements.

And when you came home to my contraption
(which looked nothing like a crib), and my tears,
my wailing I cannot even drink wine!
You promised we would build it together.

In time, you straightened my odd, bent angles.
Your hands smoothed the frantic sharp silhouette
into proper planes, safe now for a child
to sleep in and upon. I can’t do this.

You can, you said. We will. You held my hands.
Look what we have built. Look what we tear down.

Wife at the Parole Hearing

Pennies are a punch
in the mouth.
I place one on my
tongue to practice
the taste of blood
for your return.
I signed up for
self-defense and
crumpled, crying.
Saw your face leering
behind the mask
and knew
that cushioned mat
would not be enough.
I dream about
your cinderblock fists,
my cheeks full
of bruised marbles
after a night of your
whiskey-drenched rage.
I lay a penny flat
in my mouth every night
before bed and I wonder
how it will feel to drown
with your hands on my throat
if your papers come through,
signed and stamped, and
you stumble home
to finish the job.

How Worship Begins

Daddy never mentioned
Mom’s God unless it was to
blame Him for days

gone wrong. He prayed
at his grill, incense sent up
to gods of meated things.

He traced miracles to
blue-collared roots, half
a step to the left from

being a carpenter himself.
I saw enough of his
wounds bound with black

electrical tape to think
he might be right, knew
those stitches that held his

tough hide together meant
more to me than nails thrust
through a drooping Christ.

The Light Becomes Us

i.

The birds start their matins
in the near-dark, serenade us
into odd dreamscapes
of lying together somewhere strange
in a place where we are not strangers.

We survive the night
like soldiers – wary, aching
for cover, wishing for more
armor than this meager sheet,
wrestling our breath into submission
until we are no longer shocked
by the trembling of flesh.

Your fingers trace glyphs
over my bare shoulders.
I wonder what spell
you cast on my flesh
in this riverdeep silence
where our bodies are soft, sated creatures
and our throats burn with what we will not say.

ii

My dark hair sighs
across your cheek, brushes
moonlight flakes
from your shoulders.
They come off on my fingers
to shine under my skin.

I make my quiet nest
in the hollows of your bones
as we lie leaden with sleep,
the weight of your gasps
still heavy on my tongue.
You are an unripe rind
firm across my back,
I am the fruit that
will not long survive your loss.

iii

Morning swings her arms
wide, and now you want me
in the sun, laying me bare
in this room that smells
of our bodies and sleep.
I am laid open in light, unable
to leap into the black river of night.

There is no shelter in this
broad swath of no-shadow.
I am gently surprised by your open eyes
holding me in this glaring truth:
at night we can dress ourselves
in heavy breath and darkness,
but oh, how the light becomes us!