from the book Before It's Light chapter: Red Velvet G-Strings And Apricot Sighs
(mad girls, Marilyn, Lorena, Jesus, and Jackie)

The Mad Girl Takes the Radio Out of the Room


takes the batteries
out of it, cuts
the electric cord
to not be haunted
by the talk jock
she’d lured with
cryptic notes
when she still
could write, verbs
sharp, luscious
as he said her
lips were after
noons as the blue
spread of roses
went from red to
flesh where she
laughed, threatened
to keep him pinned
leaning against
the night stand like
a totem, plastic
as his glib gaff, an
air hostage in
lilac light until
leaving, he says
thanks and suddenly
the xx’s on the
shower door no
longer stand
for kisses

 

The Mad Girl Hums “I Got Along Without You
                Before I Met You”

down Union Street in
warm mist, knows
when you write some
thing it often
becomes true later.
Cocoa eyes stare
back in the mirror,
for once, not the
color of red lilacs
that st6ill haven’t
bloomed. She thinks
how when she
scrawled “more” it
looked like “none,”
of those blue sheet
May nights, remote
as fishing villages
past Stockholm,
how if you stare
at the sun too long
it can take
days of darkness
to see again. And
even then, there
are ghosts

 

The Mad Girl is Flip, Uses Words

for barriers, like
the vines that tangle
over her front door,
or her hair, strands
snaring and weaving
a mask nobody
can quite see thru.
Her words seem like
beacons but their
brightness disarms
you like someone
naked under the
wildest glare,
blinding you in
ways you never
realize, a mask she
puts on and
can do what she
chooses behind,
barbs, quills that
seem impossible to
touch, you can’t
see her shiver
under them

 

 
    from my 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."

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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