June: Tinea
or ringworm which I refuse to allow
myself to Google Image hell
it took me ten years to allow myself
to consider how old you’d be now
mother shaking your denim bell
in a kitchen always avocado
smoke whole notes our thrumming
home lined by lilacs green apples
lake water behind forest before sounds
so idyllic it’s ridiculous
that I have both arms under a soggy
box of records when the neighbor
squares her hands on my shoulders
squeezes remembers dad
(now dead) chasing you naked
through the field waving
a pistol at your lovely I must not
have woken that night Special
Little Lady that I was for always taking him
by the hand to the orange rocking chair
spider swinging into that bright crushed
not quite velvet where you weren’t
well but weren’t being beaten anymore
so shhh quiet down now daddy
there’s no reason to be so light
house in the living room or living
loom as I’d say then that’s how
little I was dad that’s how little
you were buttersoft hands
around everyone’s throat
abysses for eyes choked
into every exploding color
less welts growing darker
than dueling empty wells
so when she says you’re a miracle
Lisa Fay I think maybe but not
the same as a Nepalese baby found
under rubble dust caked
over his eyes all messiah in the fire
fighter’s arms not like proof
of divinity but bones never broken
though molded by aftershock.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the 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 writing has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Recent poetry and prose publications include Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and Poets & Writers. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in Poetry in the University of Oregon’s MFA/CRWR program.