Brenda Coultas

 
 
 

Mortal Beauty


Angel with a bright red suitcase came to the door
We walked the streets of Catskill
We walked alleys and ice cream parlors
I saw my future in a jar so I dashed it to the floor
I saw small pieces of wood ground into the dirt
The walls throbbed from the roots up and asked, “Are you the one who made the angel?”
The angel with the bright red suitcase never complained about the beauty of mortals
One day the angel opened the suitcase
The suitcase contained the seeds of all living things
Puppies and babies, fruits and nuts, and seeds as small as dots of dust
When the angel opened the suitcase the seeds of all living things burst out like a brood of cicadas
With only days to live

 


I Once Lived


I once lived there on the water and the bridge is famous
Like in pictures or wedding cakes, frosty and white
But crossing it is like rolling suitcases on stairs
crossing over is ordinary
stone and pavement
but underneath
ferries and speed boats

I once lived there for a short time
I met a man who knew the same people back home
Only he didn’t really know them except as fellow professors at faculty meetings
Coffee shop with a little air conditioning is where we met
It was not a romance
We became a pair and took a ferry to an island to hear music in a medieval church
Mosaics of Christ and his cohorts on the ceiling

I once lived there the same as glass blowers and grave diggers
Like the live camera pointed at my bridge
A tongue clicking in code
Before my breath
An undefined future tense

 
 
 

Houses

 


I woke up and saw that my hands had become small chairs. I sat on them
and fractured the left and the right. My hands were small chairs, I painted
them in rainbow colors. Imagine this, after dinner my hands became tables.
I placed several art books upon them and then a goosenecked reading lamp.
My eyes became eggs and fit comfortably inside my sockets; my sockets
could have been egg cartons for all that it mattered. My tables became
houses and we, my partner and I, moved in.

 
 

In the mid-90s, Brenda Coultas moved to New York City from the Midwest to
work on the staff of the Poetry Project. She is the author of five collections of poetry,
including The Tatters (Wesleyan University Press, 2014) and The Marvelous Bones
of Time (Coffee House Press, 2007). Her work can be found in Bomb, The Brooklyn
Rail, and the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia). Her new book, The
Writing of an Hour, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2022.