#lyn lifshin

[violettesiren]

this morning the pond looks like marble. Rose and charcoal dissolving to dove, to guava, rouge. Only mallards pushing holes in the glass, so unlike the pond, deep in trees, almost camouflaged, startling as coming upon your reflection in a mirror, just there under trees and the wooden bar and the driftwood benches blackly jade with pines dripping into it, shadows close to my hair. What I didn’t have blinded me so I hardly saw the small birds, blue, pulling out of moss and needles as if reaching into the dark for their color

September 26, 1996 by Lyn Lifshin

[contremineur]

You always longed for longing more than anything else.

Lyn Lifshin, final lines to Last night was less dark than dreams were

from here – thank, poem-locker (longing since December 2015)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[with my dad :: 1950s]

* * * *

The Pearls

An engagement present from my husband’s parents, they seemed like something from a yearbook photograph. I’d have preferred a wrought-iron pendant, costume beads that caught the sunlight. Pearls were for them,

and I was always only a visitor in their world. He wished I would call him “Dad,” but “Sam” was all I could get out. It was hard to throw my arms around him, to kiss his cheek. And not just because they thought me a hippie,

a witch who’d stolen their son’s car and stamp collection. Pearls didn’t go with my corduroy smocks and long straight black hair. They clashed with the hoops of onyx and abalone in my ears. They might have gone with the suits I’d thrown away, no longer a graduate student trying to please, but they weren’t suitable for hiding in the trees with a poet or throwing up wine after poetry readings. The pearls reminded me of the way I’d once thought I was: studious but not wild, not interesting.

I put those pearls on last night, though, after finding them shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch. They didn’t seem ugly and apt to choke but gentle and mild, as so little in my life is these days. I slept in them and nothing else, as if they were a part of me.

Lyn Lifshin :: The Sun

[alive on all channels]

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Abraxas, vol.2, n.3: two women poets (James Bertolino, editor, Besmilr Brigham & Lyn Lifshin, poets) - Abraxas Press - 1970

[manwalksintobar]

Being Jewish in a Small Town  // Lyn Lifshin

someone writes kike on the blackboard and the “k’s”  pull thru the chalk    stick in my

plump pale thighs even after the high school burns down the word is written in

the ashes    my under pants elastic snaps on Main St because I can’t go to

Pilgrim Fellowship I’m the one Jewish girl in town but the 4 Cohen brothers

want blond hair blowing from their car    they don’t know my black braids

smell of almond I wear my clothes loose so no one dreams who I am

will never know Hebrew   keep a Christmas tree in my drawer      in

the dark     my fingers could be the menorah that pulls you toward honey in the snow

[conniecorleone]

JEANNE-MARIE PLOUFFE

Small and dark behind your mother's full skirts as she cleaned other people's houses. Florence and I imagined worms slithered through you when you ate lumps of sugar in my grandmother's bathroom, still stayed thin. Eyes like cloves under huge lashes in classes you wouldn't say a word in. "Canuck" the boys called out over Otter Creek Bridge as your legs got less spindly and the girls from college professors' homes didn't invite you. People said your last name with the tone they'd say tramp. Your skin creamy, your hair curled with night. There wasn't a boy who didn't think he could put his hand inside your dress. You never said anything, as if a part of you was already gone, as if there was some place to go to. Once, singing of Quebec, your eyes gleamed like the gold cross boys yanked from your neck and tossed in the snow. I heard the trailer burned down, the survivors headed north. Jeanne-Marie, if you read this please write me

Lyn Lifshin from Buffalo Spree, Winter 1995

[sfsucw]

Poetry Submissions

Shō Poetry Journal has published poets such as William Packard, Jim Simmerman, Amy Uyematsu, Virgil Suárez, Gerald Locklin, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Lyn Lifshin, and Robert L. Penick. We seek to publish a broad spectrum of voices and are especially interested in promoting the work of historically underrepresented poets. We are open to most forms of poetry, apart from light verse.

Expires:March 15, 2023

https://www.clmp.org/members/open-submission/sho-number-3/

[begottaum]

[I want to eat that light.] Every thing that grows does.

Lyn Lifshin, from “Honeysuckle”  

[nadiagiordana]

Remembering the Queen of the Small Presses

https://writersshowcase.substack.com/p/remembering-the-queen-of-the-small Nadia intro: This is an interview I conducted with poet Lyn Lifshin several years ago via postal mail. Considered one of the most prolific poets in modern times, Lyn Lifshin’s poetry books number more than 125. Her works have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the country up until the time of her death on…

[mykristeva]

Lyn Lifshin

[violettesiren]

Having You Come Up After So Much Time

thinking what it would be like re- reading your letter like a map I folded September then un- folded it again. I thought I was ready but it was like thunder you hear on the phone when you're talking to someone where the storm is. You know it's coming moving east like most weather but you still wake up startled, dazed. When it breaks, the rain on the glass, the lightning that makes the room even darker

Having You Come Up After So Much Time by Lyn Lifshin

[dk-thrive]

I put those pearls on last night, though, after finding them shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch.

The pearls reminded me of the way  I’d once thought I was: studious but not wild, not interesting.

I put those pearls on last night, though, after finding them shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch. They didn’t seem ugly and apt to choke but gentle and mild, as so little in my life is these days. I slept in them and nothing else, as if they were a part of me.

— Lyn Lifshin, from “The Pearls” in The Sun Magazine (August 2020)

[libnadalex]

Visited the home of poet Lyn Lifshin yesterday and brought a few books home.

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

Poem: My Mother and the Lilacs —Lyn Lifshin

My Mother and the Lilacs —Lyn Lifshin

Their purple meant spring. “That whole apartment was lilacs,” she glows, retelling how the one she couldn’t marry but checks for in phone books fifty years surprised her with orchid and snow. She wishes for a yard, for daughters who will plant lilacs that bloom, not just stunted twigs shadowed by pine. Unlike card games, where the one with nothing wins, what never bloomed haunts the most.

[thehumanline]

“Honeysuckle” by Lyn Lifshin, Rattle (2013)

[danielriddlerodriguez]

THE OTHER FATHERS --Lyn Lifshin

would be coming back from some war, sending back stuffed birds or handkerchiefs in navy blue with Love painted   on it. Some sent telegrams for birthdays, the pastel letters like jewels. The   magazines were full of fathers who were doing what had to be done, were serving,   were brave. Someone yelped there’d be confetti in the streets, maybe no school. That soon we’d have bananas. My father sat in the grey chair, war after war, hardly said a word. I wished he had gone away with the others so maybe he would be coming back to us