Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois UP, forthcoming 2015), winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, and Best of the Net. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where she served as poetry editor for Quarterly West.---------
The Way The Plot
always unexpectedly the apple
falls rotten from the top
tier of the wire basket
dull thud dumb roll always
while your back is turned
& you’re spooling
noodles with the small clean fork
on any otherwise quiet day
so it strikes you like a man
you loved silhouetted against a garage
wall behind your bright headlights
holding the cordless phone
away from his face that tells you everything
the chaplain on the other end will say
about slight snow just covering
pine needles & maple leaves soft soft webbing
beneath that cracked bathroom window
where your mother did not fall
soaping in the shower or suffer a stroke
folding laundry or prepare you
for loss that nails your knees
to this filthy floor that forever catch-
of-breath when wrist-deep in warm
water hips pressed just enough
against the sink to forget a moment
of your weight hips just past craving
his hands to your sway some
fruit you meant to eat hums low
in the throat of every paradise
you’ve been asked to leave.
Relinquere
It’s not that you’re unsure if tomorrow
will come, but if you’ll saunter into it
with shoes & socks or barefoot & tight
inside ice skates. Always shuttling
some son through some dark, pulling away
from curbs without looking. Sometimes
metal, sometimes glass. Breathing’s the act
of faith the dead must unlearn. In your dreams,
shot in the gut, electrocuted, shoved
from an orphanage window, you feel cheated
to wake as the last governed shutter blades
dark & sharp counter the clock & all hurt
abandons you, then, when your heart’s final
word is clear: leave behind, quit, go go go
Portrait as Facts of Energy Between Us
Alone your heart thrums enough
to light a small lamp or power a hand
held radio. Together our two hearts
could charge a guitar amp. You & I
emanate the color of a small sun
& people orbit around us even
when we need to be alone. We tend
our better health when we’re in love.
Each level of energy registering higher
octaves than the next until we reach
the I-Thou, the rainbow, the golden
egg, knowing perfection within our
imperfections. Divine will is a blueprint.
A white line perforating the center of our
bodies roots us to the same space of earth.
I pencil into a lake. You bury your dreads
in a mountain cave. Intersecting streambed,
vortex, radiant cloud, little television set.
I’ll let you play the stronger field. Slam
me against your frequency, other half
of this red secret that cannot be kept.
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CoutleyLisaFay--credit Lillian-Yvonne Bertram