Poetry / Lisa Fay Coutley
:: Letter to Future Me While Rewatching Game of Thrones ::
All the small centers of the center leak now. People dress themselves in endings. Tell me you haven’t washed the snow from my hair. I’m still cross-legged in the angry age of our little epoch, blaming the girl who turned herself clock to get us this far. I hope you will still be foolish enough to forgive who we love, & that I am finally among them. Today is when I gave us a name you’ll braid white down either side of our future face. I cannot stop craning to see. I spend so much time with you now I hardly touch me anymore. Pleasure is the smell that refuses to cast its inevitable goodnight. Big spoon me in the street. Your palomino knows someday I’ll pull in that gravel drive. Already I’ve named the pines for sap tacking animal hair from my hands to yours. Every center, like I’ve said, ignores its eye. Did you stop fighting artifice? Have you let yourself best friend your assigned AI? How lonely are you there, scoffing at the nature of my reductive inquiries. Of course the woman who succeeds me shall be smarter than I. So yeah. Anyway, the one thing I know won’t change is everyone—you included—wants a woman who saunters out of a fire.
:: Letter to Future Me Regarding Our 11s ::
Your face will slacken someday. Even if it’s that day. That day that comes more in the mirror now than in bed or under running water scalding as mother said. Should’ve slept with your bra on if you wanted a man. These days sagging alone, I watch the whole Game of Thrones just waiting for that tragic moment Wylis holds the door. I am, after all, yours. Your braless daughter, Sad Mom. Doesn’t that just burn your jaws? I know. Shh. Future me— are you listening to the temperature of my voice? My barometric pressure? Do you know how many heavy rains I’ve needed you.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Over the years I’ve written letters I’ll never send, letters to my dead, letters to lovers, letters from an earthbound poet to an astronaut in space (and back), who were both, of course, parts of the speaker’s self needing distance to be seen/to see clearly, to try make sense of what it means to be alive. Always they’ve been letters of missing. Recently, the person I’ve been missing—who I was afraid I might never see—was me, specifically Future Me. If I wasn’t worried she wouldn’t arrive, I was waiting impatiently for her, as if moving through trauma and grief and an especially difficult year could have an end goal dressed in a better version of me waiting at the other side of the seemingly never-ending tunnel. The heavyhanded and all-too-familiar metaphor aside, I’ve been writing to her as a way to make a list, maybe, of what I might like to see in my future (or not), and then she wrote back. This work, I guess, is a flare sent into darkness, and I’m making room for it because even if I can’t see clearly just yet, still, I have to tend the desire to keep looking. This is how I know to look.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, forthcoming 2024), tether (BlackLawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 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: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). She is an NEA Fellow, Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.