Lyn Lifshin

Just out from Lyn Lifshin: The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffin, Texas Review Press. Also just out: Another Woman Who Looks Like Me from Black Sparrow at Godine, selected as the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has over 120 books & edited 4 anthologies. Her website: www.lynlifshin.com   Her last two Black Sparrow books, Cold Comfort and Before It's Light, won Paterson Review Awards. New also: In Mirrors, An Unfinished Store, The Daughter I Don't Have, She Was Found Treading Water, August Wind, and An Unfinished Journey. Comming soon: Tsunami Poems,  and All The Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living And Dead, All True, Especially The Lies, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness will be published by Texas Review Press in March 2008 and Desire will be published by World Parade Books in March 2008.

from January Poems, 2006

Rage January 4, 2006

even though it’s not
raining, it might

as well be. You
can cut the pewter

Grey’s a thick
grease anything

not vicious
would slide from

Come on, don’t tell
me you don’t know

mornings like this.
Don’t you some

mornings just not
give a shit about

everything that
was everything,

that mattered?

 

 

January 4 Rage

ragged as
the bare elms

and as diseased.
The grey stained

snow could
be everything

I feel between us:
used, cold, ugly,

nothing anything
could help do

except get rid of it

 

 

Rage Even After Ballet

the stink of is words,
I can’t pirouette:
they’re stones,
not blood in my
body. Rage clots,
a stone baby
I’ve been
pregnant with 13
years. The bigger it
grows, the more
it tears up, suffocates
until nothing
normal people do
is possible

 

 

Rage, January

the only color
on a day of
pewter shapes,
a deep red,
color of a
tulip of
blood. Its
glass petals
so fragile a
heart beat
could shatter
them stain
Wednesday

 

 

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