Lisa Fay Coutley, Featured in the New Ocean State Review

ACOA Questionnaire

1) What is an ACOA?

My first love’s father was wearing
a strange lady’s bra over his shirt
when we came home drunk & went
to bed together at sixteen years old.
He said, tilting his head toward
my chest, don’t need more than
a mouthful anyway, son. Sleep well.

2) Do my parents need to be alcoholics?

At least once every day, I practice
in my bathroom mirror both sides
of the hypothetical argument I plan
to have with a stranger or love interest.
At night, I lie in bed certain the world’s
largest sinkhole is located directly below
my home that has stood here eighty years
but will be consumed during my tenancy.

3) What is the cost?

My second love’s father struggled
to balance himself on a bucket to see
through the window while I peed.
Later he kissed me hard on the mouth
twice, for birthing his son’s son (my
own dad there—disgusted though
smirking toward my best friend’s
camel toe). Oh, boys—

4) What is a Higher Power?

don’t look at me like I don’t know
a boner often accompanies a hug.
Let me never neglect the third
love—tender, intelligent, & better
at convincing me that our professor
was not studying the curve of my ass.

5) Can I attend a Closed Meeting?

This isn’t just for uncles who run
their palms up a girl’s sick bed
while her dad’s out of town
& her mother is not yet dead
drunk but she’s not home either.

6) Where is a meeting?

Blackout doesn’t mean forget.
A brain simply stops making memories.
Where was your mother? Where’s the girl
who can do the worm, who shoots eggs
in haystacks, who gets nervous & kazoos
with her mouth the entire Wreck
of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

7) How do I find a meeting when there are none in my area?

What of the sun dumping
through the bay window turns
days to years & what’s remembered
can’t be forgotten but what can’t be
recalled won’t let go. Who no longer
knows her only sister’s address. Who
holds the bulb to a poisonous plant
can’t refuse chewing with both hands.

Lisa Fay Coutley on “ACOA Questionnaire”

Usually I write with an image or phrase guiding me until I find the poem’s shape based on the discovery I make (structure as a function of content), but I’ve written most often and for so many years about growing up among addiction and how that later affected my single motherhood that it can be difficult to see this content new, though the desire to learn and grow away from dysfunction never fades. In “ACOA Questionnaire,” the questions prompt the content, so rather than form arising organically, this form forced me toward content I might not explore otherwise. As such, I owe a big nod to those who’ve written questionnaire poems that gave me permission to find a new way to see an old obsession—Wendell Berry’s “Questionnaire” is unabashedly didactic, urgent, and confrontational (I’m a big fan of backtalk); Charles Bernstein’s “Questionnaire” asks its reader to be involved in a way they really can’t; and most tenderly, Oliver de la Paz’s “Autism Screening Questionnaire—Speech and Language Delay” exposes the coldness of its rubric while brimming with the kind of love and ache only a parent can hold. Each informs the way I try to use the form, to refuse its questions, and to dig beneath a surface I’m only beginning to be able to explore. In my questionnaire, the poem refuses to be dutiful, moving away from the dynamic of its own rhetoric, and I seek that kind of negation when considering my place in a legacy of addiction and abuse.

Lisa Fay Coutley’s website: www.lisafaycoutley.com

On Twitter: @LFCoutley

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). She’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and Waxwing. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.