Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day, featuring a total of 30 authors from our list. Today’s featured poet is Lisa Fay Coutley, author of In the Carnival of Breathing.
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
and 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.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 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, Ninth Letter, and Best of the Net. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Utah.
