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Lyn
Lifshin
- USA
Kiss,
Baby, The New Film
a
much more rare obsession than mine, tho
in
some ways, not that different. The woman
in
love with what’s dead, what’s given up
on
breathing, caring, could be me knocking
my
knuckles raw on your metal door while
you
gulp another beer, put your head down
on
the table. With you, it often was like
singing
to someone in a casket the lid was
already
down on, still expecting something.
She
buried animals in the woods, didn’t mind
touching
them. Though I made our nights into
something
more, I could have been coiled
close
to a corpse. No, that part is a lie. Your
body
was still warm. It was everything inside
where
your heart must have been that was
rigid,
ice. The woman in the film went to work,
an
embalming assistant. Isn’t that what I’m
doing?
Keeping you with words? Embracing
you
on the sheet of this paper, a tentative
kiss
on cold lips, the cuddling of cadavers?
In
the film, the woman says loving the dead is
“like
looking into the sun without going blind,
is
like diving into a lake, sudden cold, then
silence.”
She says it was addictive. I know about
the
cold and quiet afterward, how you were a
drug.
If she was spellbound by the dead, who
would
say I wasn’t, trying to revive, resuscitate
someone
not alive who couldn’t feel or care
with
only the shell of the body. Here, where no
body
can see, I could be licking your dead body
driving
thru a car wash. I could be whispering
to
the man across the aisle, “bodies are addictive.”
Our
word for the loved and the dead are the same,
the
beloved, and once you’ve had either while you
have
them, you don’t need any other living people
in
your life
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Lyn Lifshin's recent prizewinning
book (Paterson Poetry Award) Before
It's Light was published winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow
press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997. Another Woman Who Looks Like Me will
be published by Black Sparrow- David Godine in 2005. She has published
more than 100 books of poetry, including Marilyn Monroe, Blue Tattoo, won
awards for her non fiction and edited 4 anthologies of women's writing
including Tangled Vines, Ariadne's
Thread and Lips Unsealed.
Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines. Texas
Review Press will publish her poems about the famous, short lived
beautiful race horse, Ruffian: The
Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian. New chapbooks include When a Cat Dies and Another Woman's Story and
forthcoming chapbooks include Mad
Girl Poems, Barbie Poems, and The
Daughter I Don't Have. A new collection, Persephone, will be published by Red
Hen Press. For interviews, photographs, more bio material, reviews,
interviews, prose, samples of work and more, her web site is lynlifshin.com.
email: Lyn Lifshin
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August 14,
2002
on
the metro,
your
old e mail
in
a pile on my lap.
They’re
like
chocolates,
so
rare I’ll never
have
them again
so
I go thru
them
slowly,
a
tiny bite,
a
flavor to
drift
in. Once
gone,
that all
that
is haunts.
If
I’m lucky,
your
words,
finally,
will
turn
stale as
old
candy,
lose
their
flavor,
not
seem
something
to
die for.
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