iPod Shuffle—When You Want It by Lisa Fay Coutley


 

to be up to someone else  the morning
            I nearly call because no one else
                        knows me losing this way

woman spooned  old hotel mattress
            straitjacket morning  sun so god
                        damned high in its sky  all the love

gone  watching you build walls
            to break down  tree diving into its ditch
                        puddle  sun just enough to make May

snow tolerable  boxes not stacking
            themselves  no regard for the leaving
                        your t-shirt busts  blood of one lung

dying  Facebook says
            I can’t
                        have a relationship
                       
                        with myself  no matter how

complicated  days never X-d on my calendar
            squares  each neat weight distributing shape
                        stacked in no trailer  I’m waving

I’m saying goodbye to

                        so much road.

 

 

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of ERRATA (SIU, forthcoming 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been awarded a fellowship from the NEA, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize.