Poetry Issue 1
Lyn Lifshin
If Those Blossoms Don’t Come
if the tangerine doesn’t
fill the house with thick
sweetness. If you put
your hands over your
ears one more time
when I’m talking. If
there’s another month
of wanting to sleep all
day, the cat the warmest
sweet thing I can imagine.
If this damn rain doesn’t
let up, I’m going to
have to rewrite the story
you’ve got in your head
about us and I don’t
think you will like
the ending
Do I Really Have to Write About What Seems Most Scary?
Isn’t it enough I’ve fought against
it with ballet classes every day,
often more than one? Do I have
to tell you about the letter
from a woman who says, “Now
in the gym the men stop looking”?
Do I have to joke, “Pull the plug if
I can’t do ballet,” laugh when a
friend says, “I didn’t sleep with him
because I’d have to get undressed”?
Do I have to remember my mother
saying she’d rather be dead
than lose her teeth?
I think of the friend who
says she doesn’t worry about what
poem she’ll read but about what she
will wear. Another says she wants
plastic surgery but doesn’t think
it’s right for someone in the arts:
shouldn’t she care about loftier things?.
I think of another woman who will
be photographed only in certain
positions. Do I have to tell you what
I’m thinking about isn’t death
Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Check out some of them at http://www.lynlifshin.com. 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."
