from the book Before It's Light chapter: Red Velvet G-Strings And Apricot Sighs

 

Still Thinking of the Poem Someone Wrote Where
     Emily Dickinson is Prissying on About What
           White to Wear and Where to Hide Her Poems

How little this person knew Emily. Jesus. Prissy.
In spite of that stupid photo. Well, Emily
was nothing like that. A cat, yes, she had a
cat but really she was more like one: wild and
sneaky, not easy to own or tame. She had
her claws --- she had a temper. You can tell she

wasn’t just lounging against the glass by the way
her poems move: darting and springing, colliding
and coming up still breathing. I suppose you
could say, as the poems did, she “hid everything.”
There are adventures, scandal no one has any
idea about but I was there. Under the white

you’ve heard so much about there was a wildness,
more vivid than any Victoria’s Secret red velvet
g-string, richer than a bra of emeralds, rubies
and gold. When she let go and danced under
a Hunger moon or a Wolf moon, snow became
a river from her heat. A poem a day some years,

that’s what they think but she was fire. A poem
an hour is more like it. And, not rushing to publish
as I did, she used real names of the lovers we
shared. No wonder her sister Lavinia burned so
much. Emily never could believe she wasn’t in the
21st century. White dresses were a disguise. Like

a robber who puts on a shirt and tie so you’ll
have your take on him tattooed under your skin
while he sweet-talks you out of millions or
gets out a gun. Flowers were perfect to disguise
the scent of gunpowder, to wrap around a knife as
she shaped words I’ve tried to make as diamond

hard to plunge in and get the work done while
you hold your breath, amazed

 

The Franciscan Who Writes Around
       Sends 150 Dollars to Long Haired Women
               For Their Used Underwear

bellissimo he writes
and then something
dirty in Italian
that no one can find
in a Berlitz. First,
he tells them he
prays for them, is
a fan. He only picks
out poets, drops them
if they cut their
hair. He says it
drives him crazy, begs
for samples as if, like
Donne, he’d die with
a bracelet of auburn
buried around what
will always hug
his bone, only he
means a different
bone

 

Barbie Wants Her Own Wishbook

she’s sick of being some
body else, some southern
belle, a porcelain bimbo
in a tier skirt, layer by
layer can be removed to
reveal, finally, little you’d
want. She’s sick of bee
hives, French twists, of
being twisted into tulle
and sequins, stuffed in a
box. She hates plaids,
never wanted to be an
Eskimo. She doesn’t
want a hope chest of
dresses but would like a
room of her own where
she can let go, sweat, get
a little belly and never
have to pull on more
than sweats or baggy
leggings and maybe at
her request, a man who is
not a dandy with a plastic
smile, in tuxedo, jeweled
turban and a pirate hat,
but somebody who can
talk and hold her, make
her feel less like something
just to dress and undress
at another’s whim

 
    from the book:
  
Before It's Light - Lyn Lifshin
$16.00 (1-57423-114-6/paper)
$27.50 (1-57423-115-4/cloth trade)
$35.00 (1-57423-116-2/signed cloth)
Black Sparrow Press

---

     Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses." She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as " a modern Emily Dickinson."

A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead

     Almost every woman I know has had at least one heart-wrenching experience with a "bad news" boyfriend, and Lyn Lifshin is no exception. In this new collection of 103 poems she chronicles her own relationship with such a man, one who happened to be a popular radio personality, yet possessed a chilly heart. She tells her tale in a sequence of poems that reads like a novel, spanning the length of the relationship from beginning to end, including a period of time years later when she learns he has died of cancer....

Laura Stamps

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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