June 30 Record Cold
Did my mother know it
would be that cold,
packing with the door
locked in the smallest
bedroom. Somewhere
else, war was moving
into the bread. She
might have thought of
this, probably didn’t,
brushing hair that
curled on its own in
the mirror over ferns
and white roses,
not certain this man
she was packing peach
satin to run off with
was the right pick
though they said the
Lipman brothers made
good husbands. The
orange lilies near the
road north must, she
shivered, mean fall
was coming. She knew
if she didn’t elope, do
what she said she
would in the morning
she’d never make the
countdown to a wedding
They Didn’t, On Their First Night, Do It
I think of my mother, almost July,
her packed black suitcase ready in the small
room with the lights out. Elope must have
slid around in her mouth like the sound of
the word cantaloupe. The silk flapper
dresses folded into themselves, so beaded
what glittered would pull the jewels out of
what held them. In three years she’d be 30.
She couldn’t marry the one she wanted,
couldn’t, everyone said, just sell books in
Macy’s, dance all night. Maybe she wondered
about more than a finger on thighs she could
not believe drove even the conservative
dentist crazy. She couldn’t know the brother
in law would call up and down the east
coast to find my father, enraged his car was
not there for a 4th of July trop. Or, touching
breasts she’d always wanted smaller thru
peach satin, know only her own skin would
hug the plum of her nipples that first night.
Maybe she left the suitcase under thick
spirea, watched for car lights, felt the silky
ditch in her thighs dampen, lace that would
coil 56 years later in a drawer. Her teeth
still white, bone white against red and her
whole body like chiffon dripping,
waiting to be ripped open
July Dark Enough
to keep the globe
of plum chunks and
cantaloupe on in
the dark hall light
barely got thru. Etched
glass. Huge mirrors,
smell of strawberries
and camphor. My
grandmother in her
room all white with
such a tall bed I’d
have needed a stool to
climb up. Mid-afternoon,
wasps buzzing near the
window apple trees
scrape, my plump
thighs kissing each
other in a way I wished
they didn’t. Hair curly
from being hosed at
playschool because I
wouldn’t make sand
huts in dying lilac. On
the landing, a bronze
woman whose one arm
held a light, skirts
swirling, as I was as
my sister, 30 miles
north, traveled toward
light from my mother’s
belly while uncles
drove from Fort Devon
and Tennessee in
scratchy army
uniforms as if to
control what they
couldn’t
from my new book:
Before It's Light - Lyn Lifshin
$16.00 (1-57423-114-6/paper)
$27.50 (1-57423-115-4/cloth trade)
$35.00 (1-57423-116-2/signed cloth)
 Black Sparrow Press
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Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses." She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as " a modern Emily Dickinson."
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