Colleen S. Harris

Spivey's

- Danville, Kentucky, circa 1999

Directions don’t matter. You can’t get there 

from here unless someone who knows the way 

takes you. No one goes to Spivey’s alone. Take 

 

the offered hand, walk out past where the lights 

on West Walnut reach their limit against rural 

Kentucky dark, out to where railroad tracks 

 

morph from coy campus landmark into a sinister 

path out toward fields of insect hum and shadow. 

Pass under a trellis you’ve never seen in daylight. 

 

When you feel instinct tug your sleeve to turn 

back, keep walking. Strain against the straitjacket 

of night, see a solitary building stark against 

 

black sky, light spooling out onto cracked concrete 

and upward, dimming old Boyle County stars until 

you could be anywhere, and nowhere. Open the door, 

 

feel heat, smell grilled onions, count crouched backs

in flannel minding their plates atop listing stools. 

A grey-haired woman wielding a spatula and cigarette 

 

over a flat-top of beef and bacon ignores you, but

your burger will show up just the way you like it—

bloody rare on a crisped buttered bun. Jason and Shara 

 

circle each other, arguing again over something, 

and nothing, Mazie flirts with a townie she will never 

see again, and you have enough quarters to play 

 

Everything I Do, I Do It For You six times in a row 

on a jukebox decades older than the song. No one

complains. Sometimes Jason will break away and twirl

 

you in tight circles on the cracked linoleum because 

he knows you need it, and your feet don’t hurt. No one 

laughs. Twenty and drunk, you never question 

 

the magic at work here, never think to invite someone 

new, never walk anyone through the odd fae night

to this place you can’t find sober in sunlight.

​​​​​​BIO

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Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, serves as a poetry editor at Iron Oak Editions, and works as a university library dean. Author of four poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent poetry includes The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), and The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025). Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 90 others. Follow her work at https://colleensharris.com