Tag: Poetry

Beach Break

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Maybe they think
because you stare,
because you’ve chosen the dullest gear:
a charcoal t-shirt and matching backpack —
the rest, slate-ash grays,
that you live alone in a small shuttered room,
goth-nihilist,
with a collection of girlie rags
and biker monthlies
from the 7-Eleven across the alley
— who knows?
maybe the pack itself is bad-ass,
where it slumps dangerously
on your shoulders,
the skateboard only pretending
to be a perch /
but in some square’s fearful fantasy
quickly spun up into the hands,
dropped ready at your feet
when the shooting is done,
when the bright bodies
of sunbathers
bleed into the sand.

But what they don’t see
are the d(-_-)b
upside-down, playing Strauss,
the dazed, goofy smile,
how on your first day off in a while
the lake with its boats and cascading laughter
elevates you as well
into the heady weekend air;
what they don’t see
is that in the jungle of your beach,
in its Amazonian gaiety,
among the bathing suits with their
parrot dances and birds of paradise,
the dull gray bird is king:
he only needs to sit here
in their awkward,
sidelong glances.

Driving the Dams at Night

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

In the day, so early even
that the red rock
had not yet caught fire,
still tindered politely
in the jaws of the sun,
a man runs in the bike lane,
slow and measured like a pro.

I’ve seen him from behind
the last three days,
my underpowered car
doing thirty-five up the hill.
Here, even fit cyclists
struggle on the dams,
seven miles of steep foothills
along a gaunt reservoir
below the Rocky Mountains.

He wears an ugly woolen cap
and baggy pants.
I wonder what brings him
clockwork out:
is it the smell of sage
in the morning wet?
The huge expanse of plains
mapped out below?
The greening of the grass?
The earth awake?
But he never moves his head
for the view.
His view is other things.

I’ve seen the same labored gaze
in the mule deer on the drive,
raising their great cupped ears
to the sound of the car,
and then back to graze.
It’s what they do.

At night the runners and the deer
have stepped away
and the car’s high beams scan the road.
I’ve had a little wine.
Not enough to blow over the limit
but enough to know,
on the edges of the rural road,
still gathered,
are all the hunted, hurt, and haunted
specters of the world.

For the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

“I’ve lost control of my bodily functions,”
she said on the phone.
Go with it, I replied.
“… and I’m bleeding from every pore.”
Maybe a personal day?
It always had a calming effect.

“Why are they taking
the headlines from my belly?”
A slow news cycle — what’s above the fold?
“Child, 3, only survivor of head-on.
It comes out like ticker tape:
tic tic tic from my belly button.”
Is there another button somewhere? Cancel? Esc?

“Rabbit problem on council agenda”
“DA to investigate party chairman”
“Juvenile held in prom shooting”
“Transit project overruns likely”
We could have seen that coming, I nodded.

“I’m scared! I’m sure I’m dying.”
Anything on the obit page?
“I can’t find that. For some reason
I think they put it in the Life section.”
There you go. Nothing to worry about.
“You’re such a comfort,” she said.

Inspiration, Prairie

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

He felt it coming over the horizon,
nowhere and always there
on the prairie
like writing itself.

It came like a storm
and he ran,
swallowed by the corn /
he remembered Meriwether Lewis
had said, in the plains
sometimes it seemed
you were out of sight of land.

It was a race to the desk,
to the single room,
and once there
only one
of three things happened:

It passed through you
like a lover and left
an imprint on the sheets.
You moved over her form,
the needle of a phonograph.

Or she was just up,
halfway out the door,
and you pulled her back
smelling of smoke, resisting,
to sit in your lap.

Or last, the room simpering
as though she had left it,
left forever and just before,
for a packet steamer
and the unrecoverable tide.

Three Gold Angels (Dramatic Monologue)

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Those are the three angels, he said,
hosted by Abraham, painted by Rublev
around fourteen hundred.
You see how their wings arch
like storm clouds punched clean
by each gilt halo, by each halcyon feather —
such a treasure! and yet some say
this is not the original here in the Tretyakov,
but that a duplicitous docent
put up to it, who knows?
by a handsome benefactor, arranged
to have it brought out at night, between shifts.

A moonless night, gentlemen,
the streets wet, silvery wet,
the discriminating collector waiting in a black car
smoking black Sobranies with gilt foils:
the slim ones, made for women
but preferred by him;
he tapped the window with a cane
and the driver, after we — after we, ha! absurd!
(after they, I should say)
received the package, sped away.

The streets were silver wet, the stubs
of cigarettes on the ground, only metres
from the Kremlin.
Think of it — the gold foil,
the gold spires, under the paper
the three angelic heads still shining
after all these years of soot and smoke!

And the sound of the Chaika,
the rumble of that perfect engine
on the cobbles, fading exquisitely
into the night — but I rattle on, eh?
To coffee! A short break
before we return to the bank perhaps?

Copyright © 2019 Lilibug Publishing.

4lb Hammer

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Jenny posted on the facebook
I was some kinda slut
and Cassie wrote a comet how
I was a redneck mutt,
and the comets kept coming
cause girls y’know don’t stop —
that’s how I found myself one morning
in my daddy’s shop.
They talked about the social
and talked about the promenade,
sayin so-and-so’s got crinoline
and so-and-so’s got laid,
and guess who out in Bleekers Woods
doesn’t have a date,
but I got a 4lb hammer.
Its such a lovely weight.

I say Hi Jen!
you and the girls just slummin?
But later in the back she don’t see it comin.
Her dates got jewry, faux as gold,
but all his cardine cufflinks
do not hold a candle
to a genuine hickory
hammer handle.

Declining Your Wedding Invitation, Liza

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Doctor Hide and Missus Heckle
request the pressure of your company
at the nuptials of their nubile
to that gin-soaked wrench William —
Bill, call him Willy,
Built-to-Spill Bill, lately.
Johnny Cum Lately, often.
Lately, too soon if you ask her.
Got the deckle edge
guilt script, ripped it
from the headlines.
Doctor Hide and Missus Heckle
resent the persistence
of your matrimony
to the moany, moany,
stop, stop! do you hear something?

Dear Liza,
Whole in my bucket,
the bamboo strip
weakening and about
to brake:
no more moon in the water,
no more fluid in the brake,
no more breakfast in the morning,
by the scream,
the cattails dancing,
the coattails flying,
the tent open,
the guests dying or unconscious,
the groom disheveled,
the bride ungroomed,
the horse pissing on his hobbles,
our mumbly peglegs soaked.

Here’s hoping there’s a hole
in the thatch of your hovel
where the rain gets
what’s coming to it.

Yellowjackets

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

It isn’t that I see them human,
these yellowjackets dying in the trap,
or compare the size of brains,
or say that there are other lives
(if there are other lives
as some monks believe),
or claim no wasp will ever cry for me —
none will ever miscount,
innocently kiss,
regret a dull
insensitivity.

But only absolute sadness
in a piece of plastic
hanging from a beam,
the circles they trace on its wall
in the town’s first frost
a million miles from purpose.
It’s just the fact of it is wrong
and nothing else.

I compare you favorably but ill-advisedly to the moon

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Out your window
a tiny fingernail of moon,
that far dead thing,
pale as a side street
movie screen,
burnished silver of old watch
orphaned under cigar box lid,
lit by the gloss
of magazine and candle wax /
reflected light:
the thing itself dried up:
a buoy, salt-rimed
so long untethered
even gulls slip ignorant over.
I want to conduct life
from my bed, you say.
You have a cough
but you are still able.
A feather ticked loose
from the pillow
dances along your arm.
You do, I say.
You are not so old as that.