Your Last Day on Earth

Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist’s scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo’s Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selves.

She was here inside the purple-eyed daisies
and honeysuckle lining the fence ?

arriving seconds after visiting the moon,
her starched, white dress

cascading from frothy clouds ?
but even more white like the light

that is said to emanate from reverence. ? from Nightshine

Carla Hartsfield is, like a figure in one of these vivid poems, ‘a charming pyromaniac.’ Under her magnifying glass, the world bristles into smoke: the ‘starched hexagons’ of Queen Anne’s Lace ‘quiver with cocaine bloom’ and water drops become ‘diamonds’ on the speaker’s skin when she plays Bach naked after a shower. Sometimes these fires liberate, sometimes they celebrate, sometimes they memorialize, and always they transform. - Stephanie Bolster