I Cannot Be Your Quiet
All my years of blustery men and me
wishing they’d stop whistling, cutting me off,
tightening the tessitura of my voice.
I never was a goddamn instrument.
I never was the night of my own streets.
Once, I was pretty. Stood like a groupie
for a boy while he played with his rock band.
Should’ve gone home, made my own bad music.
Hoped the boys would call late from their hot thrones,
as if I ever was some bright princess.
Should’ve called girls. Shouldn’t have waited for
the old shrink to get dressed and see me out.
I watch men spin the world on windlessness,
trapped, now, in twisters of my own silence.
If You Had the Lepidopterous Life of the Woolly Bear Caterpillar, Pyrrharctia Isabella
The mythic life of the woolly bear means
she’s a weaver of weather, a silent
body of storm wandering in her stripes
of black and orange, which is to say she’s
starlessness and rust, ink against amber.
When her orange bands grow so very wide—
her apricot, her copper, her curry—
she’ll predict mild winters of persimmon
sunsets that might make you smile with who you
could become, the coral light a salve for
your somber body shadowed with your past
that lingers as you cross the roads of your
life like woolly bear, who never knew she’d
grow wings, be Isabella, of the flame.
A 2022 finalist for the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize winner for her essay “Dark Horse,” Lisa Couturier is author of the collection of essays, The Hopes of Snakes (Beacon), and the chapbook Animals / Bodies (Finishing Line), winner of a Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. She is a notable essayist in Best American Essays, 2004, 2006, 2011. A writer with the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, Couturier is currently at work on a manuscript about Parkinson’s disease. She lives in Maryland, on Montgomery County’s acclaimed Agricultural Reserve, where she keeps her five horses, where a family of crows occasionally brings her gifts, and where a pair of black vultures visit her each summer.
Image: Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
