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Lyn is an accomplished poet, responsible for over 100 books. Winner of the Jack Kerouac Award, among others, she's been Poet In Residence at a few colleges, taught writing courses, and has been editor for four women writers anthologies. Visit her site. |
© 2008 Lyn Lifshin
SHE WROTE SHE HAS LOST HER HAIR
her appetite and hope
after six years on the
move in Columbia's
jungles. Here we are
living like the dead
the rebel captive
wrote her mother.
the same strength,
it is very difficult to
continue believing.
I am not well physically,
my appetite is frozen,
my hair is falling out.
A short video tape
shows grainy images of
an extremely gaunt
woman staring at the
ground, rosary in
hand, an out spoken
former law maker once
determined to tackle
Columbia's rampant
corruption. She said it
was too risky to
send proof they are
a live, too risky to
the ones delivering it.
my sore neck she wrote.
the only woman among
several male prisoners,
some who have been held
for years. Life is not
life here but a gloomy
waste of time." She
said they subsist on a
hammock stretched
between two stakes and
a tarp which acts like
a roof and allows
the prisoners to think they
have a house. I live like
an animal. At any moment
they give orders to pack up
and I wait in all kinds of
holes like an animal.
NUREYEV
carried to school
by his mother on her back.
No shoes. Cold Baskirig
wind. Called a beggar
by children, one day
he fainted from hunger
52 years later, a
single pair of
Rudolf Nuereyv's
ballet shoes sold
for more than $9,000
RUDOLF NUREYEV
his poetry of the feet,
"Everything I have," he
said, " the legs have
danced for." From
starving, eating potato
peelings in Ufa in
Russia, he left an
estate worth twenty one
million. His power
ful body, dark soul
astonishing across
the stages, the modern
altars of the world
HAVE YOU EVER READ PASSIONATE POEMS
poems so erotic and tense,
not just nights with a stranger
poems but long married
love, no lust poems and felt,
just felt somehow you weren't
quite with it? Fell short?
Come on admit it, have you
ever felt as turned off as walking
thru a sex shop to find fur
crotches, crotch-less pants,
more uncomfortable than sexy,
dirty as carrots jerked out of
earth where they'd been in
darkness, earth still clinging.
Haven't you, be honest, felt
what was forbidden turned you
on more, the press of a thigh
in a smoky café, Austin, some
one you'd never stand near
brushing your teeth and flossing?
Haven't you ever felt the act was
as little different than being one
of the girls in a whorehouse?
Putting on a show when you
want to sleep and dream of some
one faceless doing what seemed
too clear for magic?
MY FAMILY, THE RACE TRACKS
Willie Shoemaker at
Atlantic City
I just wanted to strut
on the boards,
slip thru crowds, new
hips in a turquoise and
sea mist dress, a
sarong sailors'
eyes licked. I didn't
care if Eddie Arcaro
was clutching a
mane. I knew
nothing.
The pound of
hooves not yet music
All work is property of Lyn Lifshin.
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