New Work

Poetry from Lou Sutherland

Posted by benjwoodard on September 30, 2024 in Published Work |No Comments

Abstract red watercolor blotches

Photo: Kseniya Lapteva

Eyes on Me

Today at art camp, a child tells me I have pretty legs, and for a moment I am so stupid with fear that I forget where I am. Because my body has been noticed before, but in all the wrong places: I’ve felt the cloud of a cigarette tickle the peach fuzz of my neck in the dimly lit corner of a grocery store parking lot, and eyes on my hips at a 3 am street corner through untinted windows, and a hand covering the small of my back in the drink aisle of the gas station. I’ve seen a man, pants around his knees, furiously pumping his slick fist around himself red and flopping like a salmon. His gaze held onto me like a brute, a Brutus, where I am Caesar and Brutus is this moment and my hand that fumbles with the keys, the door handle, is the flash of the knife and the blood that follows. Today a child tells me that my legs are beautiful, but then she points to the strokes of warm watercolor dried on my thighs like filters of light. I painted a sunrise yesterday—I had forgotten. Yet even still, a bruise hidden under layers and layers of shell-pink new skin is asking, over and over, Where is the war?
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Lou Sutherland (she/they) is a poet and prose writer from the South who is fascinated by the bridge between the psychological and the fantastical. Their writing tends to focus on elements of nature, mythology, and aging across the lifespan. You can read more of their work in the Georgia Magazine, Agnes Scott’s Writers Festival, and Mercer University’s literary magazine The Dulcimer. In 2019, she received the Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize for her work “until i am”.

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