Issue 9
December 2001
Kevin Cutrer
I am a freshman at Southeastern Louisiana University, located in Hammond. I am a Mass Communications major and a Creative Writing minor. My deepest passion is poetry, making little word machines and watching them move. A piece of my work will be seen in the October issue of Dead Mule, School of Southern Literature (www.deadmule.com).
Blue Couch (Real Audio Reading)
in memory of Ruth McGregor Cutrer, 1901-1998.
I try to place myself within the boundaries you held
And I cannot; I can’t imagine seeing freedom dwindle,
The world extending only to the porch, then only the living room,
And finally a hospital bed replacing the blue couch that
You swore would never leave the shrinking house.I remember threading my fingers through the holes
of the crochet pillows you made to adorn that couch.I don’t wonder why that mere sofa and its old pillows
Were so precious to you. When the world ceased to be
Earth, and became instead the bedroom, the hallway, and
The living room, that’s where the guests would sit: grandkids, sons,
Members from church, the pastor and old friends, to visit and speak
With the oldest living member of Spring Creek Baptist,You had the certificate
Pinned on the wall.When the couch disappeared
And in rolled a bed with thin metal bars
And oxygen tanks, and sheets profanely white,
Accompanied by a woman
From Hospice...I wanted the couch back, too,
And the pillows.Not the sterile sheets,
Not the metal tanks,
Not the plastic veins
Breaking through
Your wrist.
Banter on a Wooden Box (Real Audio Reading)Banter on a wooden box
Redundancy in three chords slowly bores
Into memory, notes to a song,
Forming a habit in my physiology,
Bones becoming singers of a song.I looked at my hairy left hand, one day in a tequila blur
And visualized the dots and lines--pages of guitar tablature
Within my spindly digits, my darkened unclean nails,
My fleshy heel of thumb, chords concealed
In pockets of muscle memory.Banter on a wooden box,
Brass and steel nearly dissolve
Ecstatic into air; strumming of those hands
That once remembered
Forlorn phrases in a jumble of disjointed thought.Notes move in blocks of four, beats uneven
No dancing on the floor, no singing
Just hitting brown and broken chords, intervals
In a triplet feel, then back to four
Tap, tap, tap, and tap the heel on the floor.