I-70 Review
Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond
Featured Poet
Lisa Fay Coutley
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, forthcoming 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, forthcoming 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). Her poetry has been awarded an NEA Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose & poetry appears in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and Massachusetts Review. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.
Shooting Geese,
I'll maintain, is a thing I did for love.
At fifteen, a girl will crouch in the blind
until her toes go numb, eager
to prove her aim. It's hard to know how far she'll go
over slick rocks at the shore's edge,
lugging her bodyweight in decoys,
for a boy. A boy who'll later trace with his finger
the white smudge growing inside her, nothing
more than a sonogram, & ask if it is
too late. Changing my mind at the right time
has never been my strength. I'd wait.
I'd hold my breath with the water
as my witness, my finger loose against the trigger,
taking direction not from that north wind
or whitecaps or silhouettes circling
plastic geese, so when that boy mouthed now
through clenched teeth it never occurred to me
that I might have been their first
warning, might have pointed toward the sun
rising & fired both rounds, as if to say no,
I won't bait them, won't
watch them glide toward those empty shells
so much like themselves, but I let them fall
one by one to the dark of that water.
By their necks, like bouquets, I held them up
as proof, then lay them in a row on shore.
There, on my knees, I gripped them
each in turn & spun their bodies counterclockwise
against the stillness of their heads,
just in case, just to be sure.
from Errata
(appeared in American Literary Review)
My Lake
My lake has many rooms and one, which is red
with a door that's always open but chained.
My lake owns boxing gloves. She owns lingerie.
She can swing, she can cha-cha, she can salsa
and tap but refuses a simple slow dance. My lake
learned early to rest the needle without a scratch.
She has been classically trained in lovemaking.
When she wants to ride a rollercoaster, she does
it alone. When she lets her hair down, men go
blind. My lake doesn't take any shit. She wears
stilettos in ice storms, does crosswords in pen.
She eats red meat. Her porch needs painting,
her flowers need weeding, but my lake reads
palms in twelve different languages. If my lake
puts her hand to your chest, she decides. At times,
whole days can pass when she won't let anyone
near her. She freezes just before she murders
her own shore. It's been years, and still my lake
won't name the delicate sound of ice taking
then brushing away. She might say it's the train
of a wedding dress, or the rain falling on a glass
slipper. There are times she sees the grace of two
loons gliding—their bodies a duet over breaking
water, and she slows herself. She makes a cradle.
from Errata
(appeared in Cave Wall)
Errata
As the story goes, the raven's wings
aren't black. They're waves capping
dark omens. Crows with curtained throats.
Who knows what falls from the shelf
inside us. Even gods skin their knees
to bleed. The man at the end of the aisle
is pocketing two-for-one toothbrushes.
The cashier is hand-perking her breasts
& picking her teeth with a receipt.
I'm sorry you won't see your son, his skin
peeling its white scarf through blizzards.
I haven't sanded the road, won't
strut across town in my ballet slippers.
Your shape in this bed is my shape.
Erase my whole notes from your page.
Two stoplights ago, the wind
off a pickup pulled us further from home.
When I said the moonlight made graves
to square off the night, I meant to say
pull over. Listen: my heart's a gutter
of ravens tugging at the firmament.
from Errata
(first appeared in Linebreak)
On Home
All winter long my sons have pointed guns
in my face and with their mouths popped
the triggers. The oldest wants to spoon me.
The youngest wants to change his name
to the playground pimp. When we circle up
for dinner, I'm careful not to say chicken breast
or meatball or anything they can follow with
that's what she said. Consider the going rate
for hormones, then picture an eager group
of eBay bidders. I joke, but someone should
tell these boys—in a wake of black mascara,
mothers drive away. All winter long I've left
feel-good Post-its on the bathroom mirror,
the espresso maker, the edge of my razor.
Every day, I've given myself reasons to stay.
from Errata
(appeared in The Hollins Critic)
Driving Drunk, & a Dozen White Crosses
from her purse to her palm, she revs her cemetery
toward a gauzy daymoon, curves our Buick
the hipbend home. Mouthfuls of ditch flowers
purple & passing, cottonwoods spilling
that moon's confetti, the coal in Mother's eyes
whitening. This is the fire I warm my hands by.
Clear the deadwood & you'll see: nothing but a girl
with a mouth dry of music. Let's pretend
this is thirst, when a girl might stagger three, maybe four
days before paving her own mirage: a single drop
of oil down a harp string. Rain. Under this influence,
it will take years to learn she's a room she drags
with her. Wall-to-wall nettles she's shaped into banjos,
maracas, a flute. When it finally comes time to sit
to the river, she'll have to finger her throat, snap in halves
all the notes that woman sung into her—
granite specks from hammer to chisel to headstone—
until the horse in her heart stamps its hooves again.
from Errata
(first appeared in Clackamas Literary Review)
Dear Mom—
It's been an hour since the storm sirens
began, yet I've felt freezing rain for days.
Outside my window, the plastic bag
snagged in the neighbor's tree is filling
with wind then letting it go over & again.
I cannot stop breathing. It's been so long
since we've spoken I've given up trying
to remember the last words you slurred.
Your voice a broken shell I cut my ear
against. You & I both know I hope for
no ocean. Now that you're dead, do you
think love is wasted on the living? I have
pretended to look for you in every face
since I left the last room we breathed in
together. Remember when you dropped
your favorite dress at your ankles & stepped
into the street without me? Each night
some woman stumbled home & tried
to cook your recipes. Her hands just cut
you. I was seven. I promised then I'd never
let her hold me. My life began inside you. What
else is there to say? When I listened to a machine
beep your last heartbeat, I never rested my head
against her chest. Dear Mom—I'm still waiting
for that horse in my heart to stamp its hooves
again. I can drop a potted plant from my roof
a hundred times, though it takes just once
for it to learn to brace against the next impact.
I'm sorry the world made it so hard for you
to know the difference between a caress
& a closing fist. I'm sorry you left yourself
alone. Lonely. Briefly, today's rain gathered
on the slats of the deck, & I admired the sky
twice. Still I wish I didn't need to see the trees
dark as charred bones, poisoned veins. I'm sorry
I made you a disease I wasn't willing to admit
I had for so many years. I close my eyes & try
to summon your face—a hole blown through
the center of every floor in this endless sky-
scraper inside me. Sometimes, in the mirror,
I stick out my tongue & widen my eyes & cry
like a baby who needs her mother to see her
need, to be her initial witness, to prove she
exists, so she can stop hauling her body
from city to city, bed to bed, searching
for herself in the faces of strangers. When
the temperature finally dropped, the rain
froze a mosaic, angry fragmented second
sky the snow is working hard to cover now.
The sun never showed today. Still I feel her
setting. As a girl, I'd sit by the shore & study
her early bruise & her evening blood spilling
under a door to another room of the universe,
as if I knew every gray day to come without her.
from tether
(first appeared in Pleiades)
Total Solar Eclipse
Every shadow will sharpen
its blade against our strained
faces, plastic glasses & necks
craning toward the Mother
who refuses to be seen
otherwise. Mystery is her
bitch. Tight leash. Biting
tenor. Forgive me for how
wet I get just imagining
the day drained of itself,
the way city lights are fires
burning endlessly from space.
New perspective, same place.
They say Play-Doh in the palm
calms a child with autism.
A paperclip over a fingernail
for a nervous speaker. What, then,
for the woman each of us tries
to see, even in her hiding, woman
of untouchable temperature—all
that collapsed matter flattened
& fierce & always made to stay
at the center of every mistake
her children make—what could
soothe her? Does she remember?
Can she forget? Does she hope,
every time she cuts herself
to crescents, that we will see her
new, so alone with her own gravity,
giving all of herself to the dark?
from tether
(first appeared in 32 Poems)
Oubliette
Father said the more love the more
work & worry. Don't tell me again
how another woman would have
known. Some secrets sit so still
at the back of your knee. Hall
leads to hallway. Ask me why
light can pour warm through a cold bay
window while water under sun is dark
as a closed door. A man's hand
erases a girl's thigh. The trees start starving
themselves into everyone's favorite color.
Her darkest room digs itself
below her throne. The body knows no
wrong move. The more love, the more.
from HOST, section **
(appeared in The Missouri Review)
Anxiety
according to my therapist, is my body's / way of saying I'm a gazelle, head bent / to long grass, eating but heeding the puma / who's tracking me, so I often stop, raise my / face & wait, unable to chew until my brain / scans the landscape to see I'm free / from teeth. In the tall window of this / office, Lucinda the magenta orchid screams / or flames or celebrates even though it is / January & there is no sky. There's an elephant / straight ahead, Buddha to the left, a trampoline behind me / where once I rocked myself still for the dull pain / in my pelvis. There are two silent clocks / & no foul smells, no reason to fear this room /
wants to hold me by my wrists / still light pours in from the north / when a man's hand erases a girl's thigh / until she's the fish with a fluke for its will / forcing her to flash her shimmering fins / bald at the water's top for some lucky bird / come pluck her my parasite inside / I'll be the bird flying a half life / singing against my own desire.
II.
Or I am not a gazelle. I am pinned
to the bed in a way only one of us likes.
I am breath locked behind the wire
drawn ribs of knowing you're running
out of this week's money to feed
your babies. I am learning to cry
quietly so as not to hurt everyone
around me. Each year I grow more
sunflowers for the faces I'm holding
underwater inside me. A bird of prey
in the house is one less in the sky.
from HOST, section *
(appeared in Gulf Coast, winner of the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize)
WRITER'S STATEMENT
People make a lot of claims about writing, as if there's one correct way to approach the page. So many rules and opinions. I've been told, for example, to stop writing poems about my dead mom or about birds, etc. Other writers have brought to my attention that, at times, I repeat specific images and lines verbatim, as if this were in error.
In the space of this generous feature, then, I chose to share Mom and trauma poems that repeat with intention because over the years I've come to see how loss/trauma parasitizes, living in my body, resurfacing as it will, often in unexpected places and at inconvenient times. I allow it to infect my work as such, recurring and calling in image and phrase not just across one poem or collection but across books and genres and through time since grief never ends; it just assumes new shapes.
I tell my students that their work needs to find its shape given their particular identities and unique content. I hope to help them let language, sound, image, inter alia, show them what the work needs in order to be its most effective self. So when I was invited to group some poems for this feature, I selected work from each full-length poetry collection I've published—Errata (2015), tether (2020), and HOST (2024)—with my students in mind (practicing my preaching and all that).
Since we've just finished our section on epistles, I've thrown in some letters, as well as poems about motherhood, another constant urgency for me. Early on I wrote poems about being a young, single mother as a way to survive. Then—once I realized I needed to write honestly at the frayed edges of motherhood—I wrote with an eye toward challenging the conventions therein, though over time those poems showed me deeper compassion for my sons, myself, and for this planet that hosts us.
To track my obsessions over time and to show the continuation of intentional textual parasitism, I've ended with three pieces that are spread over HOST's halves, stitching certain hurt through various relationship dynamics and losses. HOST is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press, March 2024, and you can read more poems from the collection at www.lisafaycoutley.com/host.
Thank you for featuring and spending time with this often complicated and painful work.
To the Friend Who Sent Me Goodwill Forks As a Gift
I'm not embarrassed to live alone
with my three mismatched forks.
I'm not sorry you had to wash one
to eat the omelet, I fried for you.
I want you to wait until your son
is asleep, then quiet into his room
to his bed's edge & try to see him
without that cosmic nightlight
inside him, in a now that does not
involve you. As they do, my sons
outgrew me & the home-cooked
meals I might throw in their faces
for the way a single mother grinds
her teeth to pieces in broken sleep.
I'm breath locked behind wiredrawn
ribs. The dark welt of alone. Blemish
even to women like you who believe
they know what going it alone means.
Co-parenting. I keep waiting for
this dark fist in my chest to pearl.
I could be baptized a second time
just to let someone hold my weight.
God, how we ruin you with words,
though we like the rhyme of saying
meth den or meth head in theory
even if I'm cursed to see a hive
of bodies pulsating around the same
hanging dime. You cannot possibly
dream there'll be a time when you will
be asked to wrap your spare silverware
& mail it to your son in his new city,
his new place, his new him, the sweet
smell of yellow smoke the only warm
blanket around his shaking frame.
from Host, section*
(appeared in Waxwing)