Lyn Lifshin’s ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME was published by Black Sparrow at David Godine October, 2006. It was selected for the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Also out in 2006 was her prize winning book about the famous, short lived beautiful race horse, Ruffian: THE LICORICE DAUGHTER: MY YEAR WITH RUFFIAN from TEXAS REVIEW PRESS. Other of Lifshin’s recent prizewinning books include BEFORE IT’S LIGHT published winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow press, following their publication of COLD COMFORT in 1997.Other recently published books and chap books include : IN MIRRORS from Presa Press and UPSTATE: AN UNFINISHED STORY from Foot Hills and THE DAUGHTER I DON’T HAVE from Plan B Press. Other new books include WHEN A CAT DIES, ANOTHER WOMAN=S STORY, BARBIE POEMS, SHE WAS LAST SEEN TREADING WATER and MAD GIRL POEMS, A NEW FILM ABOUT A WOMAN IN LOVE WITH THE DEAD, came from March Street Press in 2003. She has published more than 120 books of poetry, including MARILYN MONROE, BLUE TATTOO, won awards for her non fiction and edited 4 anthologies of women=s writing including TANGLED VINES, ARIADNE=S THREAD and LIPS UNSEALED. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of an award winning documentary film, LYN LIFSHIN: NOT MADE OF GLASS, available from Women Make Movies. Her poem, ANo More Apologizing@ has been called Aamong the most impressive documents of the women=s poetry movement,@ by Alicia Ostriker.@ An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical series, AOn The Outside, Lips, Blues, Blue Lace,@ was published Spring 2003. WHAT MATTERS MOST and AUGUST WIND were recently published. TSUNAMI is forthcoming from BLUE UNICORN. Arielle Press will publish POETS (MOSTLY) WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME, LIVING AND DEAD. ALL TRUE, ESPECIALLY THE LIES summer of 2006. Texas Review Press will publish BARBARO: BEYOND BROKENNESS in March 2008 and World Parade Books will publish DESIRE in March 2008. Red hen will publish PERSEPHONE in March 2008. For interviews, photographs, more bio material, reviews, interviews, prose, samples of work and more, her web site is www.lynlifshin.com.
REMEMBER WHEN YOU WONDERED WHAT “IT” WOULD BE LIKE?
From the first pages in Love Without Fear
where it said if you let a man put his tongue
in your mouth you’ll let him do anything?
Remember when you thought you could
get pregnant dancing too close? How
fingers on the outside of a sheer shear
blouse was one thing but moving in past
the bra strap felt like a bug invading. We
were shocked to hear Jessica’s mother and
father took a bath together, naked. Somewhere
else Heathcliff adored without touching.
Remember when some mothers forbid Snows
of Kilamanjaro? Clitoris, a word I didn’t
know but when I felt mine it seemed broken,
peculiar. And did you look forward to
blood in your crotch? Remember getting
that first tampax in right, first diaphragm?
I was sure everyone could tell by the way I
was walking. And dear room mate, if
you are out there reading poetry which I
don’t suppose you do, remember how we
lay in the dark in the pea green room,
wondered what it would be like to have Dr
Fox with his red beard go down on us.
Was it this, was it love that would rescue
us and keep us safe from getting into
trouble, which of course it didn’t. Still,
somehow, older than parents with their
litany of “never let a boy,” rarely, but once
on a velvet brown couch in the west with
the heat from his thigh a forest fire,
all I could imagine, all I wanted was to
know what he would be like
suddenly something is very
changed. It’s like that
snow smell in the air.
You’ve noticed it,
haven’t you? And know
the way it sends you
tumbling to decades ago.
Smell is the one sense
that can’t be censored.
But sometimes just
a word in an e mail, the
slightest dry brush
of lips lays the whole
scenario out. One shrug
of the shoulders of the
man my mother loved,
one I may have a Yiddisher
name but that doesn’t
mean I’m not goyim
and my mother knew,
as I do, tho we go on
living quietly
CHILD PRODIGY’S TIME TO DIE, SOMETHING GREAT MOM SAYS
Now, I have to ask you because I don’t
get it. If you had a child that began reading
as a toddler, played piano at 3 and then
gave a high school commencement speech
at ten saying he was so different, so unusual
he “practically qualified” for the endangered
species list. Would you just smile, or think
something is weird. Imagine your child is a
child prodigy because he is, they say,
composing and recording music, winning
violin competitions, breezing thru college
with an IQ of 178. You’ve got, lets say, this
kid who masters everything. Photography.
Math. He just hurtles thru life like a meteor.
Then you come home and your little genius
is dead, there on the floor, a gun shot wound
to his head, a hole apparently he put there.
Wouldn’t you be putting on your crying
shoes? Doing a wild “take a little piece of
my heart,” Janis Joplin, wailing and moaning?
Wouldn’t you shriek and wonder what you
didn’t see coming? Would you just come
out and say, as if you were talking about the
weather, “earthly world didn’t offer him
enough challenges and he felt it was time
to move on and do something great.” Jesus,
if I was his mother I’d wonder, wouldn’t
you, what kind of job I did home schooling
him, wonder about him taking Independent
Study High School by mail. When she
says “he was so connected to the spiritual
world he felt he could hear people’s needs and
desires and cries and we just felt like some
thing touched him that day and he knew he’d
have to leave to save others.” He isn’t my
child, he isn’t yours but I wonder if maybe
he saw some other kids he could have stayed
When I can’t find the photographs
of my mother, it’s like losing her
again. There she was, her teeth
still white, raven hair the Charles
River wind sweeps away from where
she was laughing with the man who
wrote, “to my angel from her
Arthur,” on the bottom. You know
he is real in poems I wrote about
this shot, wondering if there is
a similar one in his (if he had them)
kids’ attic, signed Teddy, the name
my mother choose. This photograph
of the 2 laughing, on my refrigerator
upstate is a piece of my body and
not finding it is like seeing lines
on my skin grow deeper. My mother
must have been mid twenties, her
perfect smile, her gleaming. She was
about to buy a new camisole this
tall man was sure was for him. With
out her smiling and free, the shreds
of laughing left in the mirror,
harden, clench. I want my mother
in that photograph before the lines of
her face began drawing back, when
you could still see the joie de
vivre everyone wrote she had in her
college year book. When I can’t
touch this photograph, I lose
a piece of myself that held her
I can still remember how
annoyed he got the first time
I used it, “Door mat,”
the way his mother let a brute
of a man walk all over her.
“Door mat”—you’d think I’d
called his mother whore or
bitch. Not strange, I went on,
so many women are at ties.
I stated a list of them: the
ones who faked orgasm to
keep some man, the ones who
say nothing when strangers
look and call their husbands,
“charming, so nice.” Door mat
I say. I like the word. The ones
someone else wipes their feet,
their penis all over: what
woman I want to say without a
job, a good job and kids hasn’t
had a stint keeping her mouth shut,
making excuses. One friend has
taken to buying cheap sexy
clothes, bustiers and fish
net instead of painting. Door
mat, dour mat. Door mat
I want to scream at him, at
my friend who coddles a 45
year olds son who probably
steals her money. Even Hilary
was I hiss, standing up for
him with his penis in who
knows whose mouth. I want
to say, maybe because I feel
so tired and hardly an Amazon
today, walking about, some
one not me, afraid like all the
other D.M’s to say what I
am really thinking
