Mickey McGary
I remember running
miles, holding the lines.
Water always thrilled us.
The canalmen coming
back from Albany,
from Utica, boats full
of coal and wheat,
bricks and maplewood.
We’d follow up James
Street near Erie. It
pleases me to talk
about being young.
Did you know this was
all swamp once?
We loved to watch
the barges get weighed.
Winters, Robert and
Billy Gee roped the
canal from Clinton to
Salina and charged for
skating. Apple trees
grew along the bank.
We were tied to the
water, grew up with
the slow rocking
boats, a white thread
in front of the ruins
of St. Anne’s all the
way to Ticonderoga
My Neighbor in Her Veils
Somewhere when she was a child on long slow
afternoons she licked persimmons,
crumpled saffron in her mother’s kitchen
of garlic and plums, her flesh camouflaged
even in the heat, dreaming papaya seeds
sprout in her belly to grow a skin doll.
I think of George Segal in his father’s butcher
shop despising the stench, daydreaming
gauze and veils, of wrapping the flesh
chunks dripping blood in white, still as a
nun, quiet as my neighbor must have
been kneeling on stone, swathed like a
nun in yards of cotton the sculptor could have
dreamed into marble. Now in a new country
far from canaries and blue limes, mocholelos,
in a town where she cant’ find good cayenne
or fresh turmeric, where people stare at her,
their eyes dark beads she can’t see her reflect-
ion in. She brings the car into the garage
on weekends to wash it without her veil but
some late mornings when everyone’s gone
from the house she runs barefoot, her hair
streaming down to the river with green pasta
for the geese whose wings flutter around
her, make her feel she is back in her mother’s
house beating quilts and pillows, their harsh
cries more soothing than English
Sadie Says Goodbye
to the bridge players at the Y
on Flatbush. She brings a goodbuy
in couplets to the woman who taught
poetry to her senior citizen group,
told Sadie she could see her dark
pines grow up from the page.
She won’t need the raffle ticket
for a microwave, the extra subway
token. She packs a few dresses,
writes a cousin in Kansas, “Isaac,
I’d like to see you one more time
but I’m eager for a little while
with my daughter. And tho I know
those poorly lit rooms, remember
the knocks in blackness, I choose
this, to leave these rooms I
longed for, thought I’d die in.
I write you my last night in
this city of lights. Already I
feel shadows in those small
rooms where the samovar may be all
that warms my fingers. But my heart
burns like feet barefoot in the
snow outside Leningrad for what
I won’t leave again.”
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
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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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