Lifshin, Lyn US

 

 

Free Verse Twelve Poems from Cove Point   If Those Blossoms Don't Come   if the tangerine doesn’t fill the house with thick sweetness. If you put your hands over your ears one more time when I’m talking. If there’s another month of wanting to sleep all day, the cat the warmest sweet thing I can imagine. If this damn rain doesn’t let up, I am going to have to rewrite the story you’ve got in your head about us and I don’t think you will like the ending     Do You Ever Feel Like One Of Those Women In Saudia Arabia   who can’t even go out in a car alone let alone appear publicly at a book signing? At least, not unless you’re ambitious and fearless, of course careful what you write beneath your veil. Not that a lot of all poetry isn’t veiled. Lets say you were hidden, only your eyes looking intent. Sure, your ok. I had a mother who let me read Snows of Kilimanjaro when other mothers hid that book but later she shook her head over a poet about an explicit way to eat chocolate. “Some day you are going to meet a man you like and then he’ll read your poems. You hear one man say “if my wife wrote what you do, I wouldn’t let her out of the house.” Another says, “at least I’ll never have to hear that poem again.” Of course I’m exaggerating. It’s what writers do. I read this poem tho the man I’m with isn’t thrilled. But there are times, like this morning when he put his hands over his ears or when someone writes about some dress I wore, or its length, or my teeth or eye shadow, I think I might as well be in a burka. “Get over it,” I’d like to say as a young Arab poet did on a call in show on Arab satellite TV when some one complained her hair was showing. That’s what I’d like to say to more than one person this morning and if asked “who allowed me to do what I’m doing?” give the same answer she did, “no one.”     Rose   when it’s behind my knees you’d have to fall to the floor, lower your whole body like horses in a field to smell it. White Rose Bulgarian rose. I think of sheets I’ve left my scent in as if to stake a claim for someone who could never care for anything alive. This Bulgarian rose, spicy, pungent, rose 16h birthday party dress, rose lips, nipples. If you won’t fall to your knees, at least, please, nuzzle, like those horses, these roses, somewhere     Another One Dead   usually in a shallow grave. He just lived around the corner. I could see his trailer, never him the father says Some drag a purple stuffed toy. Most are carried from warm sheets their scent fades in. The lilies are blooming. Something in me has been carried away. They come in the night thru an unlocked door in your side. What could have flowered is forced. White lilacs, plum. In the gravel beside the highway, the dead take your breath away. In photographs flashed over TV they are always smiling     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 1 nobody can get enough of them. In photographs, they were beautiful. A camera pans their bedroom, the sleeping pet that never barked, small pink sneakers in a corner These about to be dead girls are carried like Scarlett O’Hara in arms of a pervert Nobody hears the door opening. Or if they do, it’s too dark for a face. The girls are becoming famous. They will smile on in photographs, pure and dead, on the piano, beauties time can’t touch     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 2   nobody can get enough of them. In photographs, they were beautiful. A camera pans their bedroom, the sleeping pet that never barked, small pink sneakers in a corner These about to be dead girls are carried like Scarlett O’Hara in arms of a pervert Nobody hears the door opening. Or if they do, it’s too dark for a face. The girls are becoming famous. They will smile on in photographs, pure and dead, on the piano, beauties time won’t touch     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 3   Suddenly, no one else is as beloved. Their last words, cherished as Jesus’, their pink pajamas relics something other than fire enters a hole in their bedroom, a sick lover, a director whose casting couch is death. These girls are beautiful on TV news, tear you up without uttering a sentence. Amber light turns them holy. They play their role to perfection. They leave DNA in their tears     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 4   Suddenly, no one else is as beloved. Their last words, cherished as Jesus’, their pink pajamas relics something other than fire enters a hole in their bedroom, a sick lover, a director whose casting couch is death. These girls are beautiful on TV news, tear you up without uttering a sentence. Amber light turns them holy. They play their role to perfection. They leave DNA in their tears They leave you in tears     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 5   more lovely than gymnasts, their skin is perfect, riveting like the look in their eyes. Nobody can believe it could happen. The dead girls will always have secrets about them the police won’t share. If its snowing, footsteps are lost under that veil, white as a bride’s. They are brides with no good end. One leaves her DNA in tears in the murderer’s trailer, her skin, the only SOS     The Dead Girls, The Dying Girls 6   They turn up on newscasts, before they turn up for good. Perfect teeth, like any movie beauties. Innocent, smiling. If you could reach thru the screen to save them. If they were probably pinned under a brute with garlic breath, in a turn off a turn. The dead, the soon to be dead are riveting. We watch like the cat glued to the mourning doves. The parents are holding up their girls’ perfect teeth, are crying These girls rarely come home as they were, grow more beautiful in memory     Dead Girls, Dying Girls   they don’t have to audition to be stars. Once their face is on a poster, no one can help being riveted. What she wore the last night anyone saw her alive, what was on her computer. Where she went before any tucked her in is a refrain on every news report. Every one looks at the men she knew differently. They search and pray while the murdering bride groom takes her face down to her last shallow bed in gravel     Dead Girls, Dying Girls   There’s nothing else like them. It’s breathless, grace while they’re missing. Parents and police clutch photographs for the camera, the last pink pajamas with feet in them. Who has taken the girls, a wild card. If she wasn’t beautiful, she will be, gazed at on cable, more famous in the paper than any model for Vogue

 

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