Issue One - Lyn Lifshin
Blue Sunday
imagining that he slips
from her the way rings
do from a finger in
the cold. Leaves. October,
black spots on the mirror.
Separation blues in the
bed. Touching his shoulders
here on paper, he's like
all the flowers that I
draw, bright wild petals
that don't connect to
any stem
The First Time
not in a marriage bed but
in a motel I could walk to
from that raised ranch my
husband and I played house
in. Virgins for years after
the wedding until I taunted
a man with words, the only
way I knew, got him to
slither in broken shoes from
another coast. I didn't know
if he really was an ex-con.
He looked like a stud. He
couldn't believe he had me
first, rocked back on his
knees in the motel as cars
honked by. I didn't know if
he could kill me, what I'd
get from him. Or that I
would not feel different,
would not feel much. I
looked in the mirror, felt
his tongue along my mouth.
Already I was longing for
quiet afternoons alone
while this large man who
wouldn't fit anywhere
slogged a beer, grinned,
said he kept tasting me
A Woman Goes Into The Cemetery
disappears behind granite
and is never heard from
again. We don't quite
believe this. She could
have gone to the museum
or called her girlfriend
to meet her for lunch
but instead took the
metro to the cemetery
as if to lie down with the
dead one who always said
her lips brought him
back to life. It was a warm
day for December even
tho it was the day of
the least light. She was
wearing the denim mini
I had in my closet,
her hair almost as long
as red as mine. Some might
suppose I'm that woman,
it seems there are clues.
But listen, the buried
man was already dead to
me before he slept
under the grave in this
city and the me who would
have banged myself
raw on his metal
door had already grown
skin too thick to feel
When He Says You Never Write Any Poems About Me
I think by "good" he means "sex" Poems
about stopping on back roads in the car with
a bigger front seat, not even waiting for
a road off a road but pulling velvet and denim
off like roast skin from a turkey. I don't tell
him, maybe I should but the poems dripping
love juice and pubic hair were written when
I wasn't getting any. A virgin after eight years,
my mind was never not on erotic movies in
my head where even the music was the in and
out of bodies. I had time in the raised ranch
to dream a man would emerge from the trees,
fantasize slow afternoons behind chiffon drapes
in the bed of white silk until it ripped. Years my
arms ached for more than the tiger cats and
the buff kitten. If a man wrote me from some
coast I opened on paper to him, came on to
strangers and convicts on the page. Those sheets
always felt safe enough to let them know their
words got me wet, even my hair was horny. I
wrote about what wasn't there, what left a hole
I was terrified I'd drown in. "Writing like a hippie
but living like a nun," a magazine quoted me
and probably I said it. It was the way those in
the concentration camp talked of food, of seeing
light, the moon, were famished for the smell of
bread. Fantasized chicken, apples, beef, all the things
they'd never thought much about when they had
more than they could devour as, baby, I do now