My Adaptive Adolescent Wants My Wise Adult to Know There’s Nothing Like Roe v. Wade Being Overturned, or a Prison Threat
By Lisa Fay Coutley
to put things in perspective, as they say, the they who always has some shit to bray about. I march streets like I’m not playing Female A who cares not how many men watch her walk, the way, as her mother claimed, she shakes her ass, cutting her cunt through his world & his. But really, count how many fucks I give on this solstice surrounded by flowering plants on a planet choked with trash as I X-out another article about litter we left on Mars. Extending our reach it seems, or just how far I’ll go to ignore what I came here to say. My yuccas puff like wedding dress sleeves, which seems so lovely I hardly recognize me in the filthy window of my parked car, which I wash now just to drive all day to see my son shrink behind a table in front of the woman balanced in front of a much higher bench because she is gavel, she is judge, she is the human who will decide his life—that’s only just begun— might be over before this summer is. How dare I dream of love blooming now.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2024), tether (Black Lawrence, 2020), Errata (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 (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is editor of In the Tempered Dark (BLP, 2024). She’s an NEA recipient and Associate Professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
04/10 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez and local poet Ximena Gómez / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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