Trying To Get The Bookstore To
                Buy My Books Blues

First I buy six books I hadn’t planned to,
look for an almanac for a friend, a book of
maps I could use a map to find in the store
where my heart’s pounding as I flail among cook
books and stock guides. The books could be my
babies I’ve brought to audition for the only

part that can save their lives. Or maybe I am
at a telethon to raise money for some operation,
a transplant they’ll die in a week if I can’t
get. This seems worse than being a pimp, worse than
a prostitute. It’s like taking off my clothes
for a lover and having him laugh or gag. Or become

terribly bored. I edge up to the clerk to ask about
seeing the book buyer. He looks snarly and stressed
and there’s a line of Christmas shoppers so I
go to the other room, near poetry, where of course
there’s a few who aren’t even buying and find a woman
who looks less jaded and mean and after I buy the books

I never wanted, manage to gasp, “book buyer, is he
here?” I remember how bad I was at selling advertisements
for the PBS station I worked for. “Isn’t in,” is a relief,
the car stalling at the edge of a chasm as brakes go. “You
can leave them with me and I will make sure he gets them,”
the woman says and I know I can’t go through this

again and awkwardly take the two books out of a Borders
bag, put my card in and flyers to order, doubt I’ll ever go
into that bookstore again. In the morning I call Clinton,
the name on the card, as nervous as if I was calling
the president and call too early, before he’s even checked
what is on the desk. “Thank you for alerting me,” he says and
I hold my breath, know I do better on paper or face
to face, stumble. I could be trying to do pirouettes not in
shoes but in bricks. “If you wanted to have them I could
supply…” and he says, “No, I’d rather deal with the publisher.
Do you want them back? Want me to dispose of them?” And I
sputter, “Mail them,” and he says, “I’ll put them aside,” and

all I can do is imagine trying to claim bits of my lips and hair,
      pieces
of my tongue that never got offered up for sale. I think of a
      German film,
Nobody Loves Me where a woman thinks the super is so hot for her
      she
decides to surprise him, jumps into the trunk of his car with only a
bottle of champagne only to find when he parks at a romantic out
      of
the way country spot, he’s got someone else, her close friend,
      spread-

eagle on the back seat so she lurches, naked except for a branch
      into the
crowded subway in Berlin, her skin the color of ruby toes.
      “Nobody
loves me,” I am sure, hanging the phone up, feeling as stripped
and silly, knowing this might be something, if it won’t
trigger sales, might make a poem



---

Cat Callahan

being fat
that spring, I still
felt fat on Main St
in my town, but

not when the science
fair went north,
Burlington for 3 days,
I met the kind of

long haired boy I
hadn’t. The photographs
with my eyes huge,
how the cop downstairs

groaned when he screamed
in with that Ford.
Relatives squirmed at
his name. By June, I

unbuttoned my sweater,
wriggling in a back
seat near Lake Champlain,
Al Martino’s Oh my Love

I’ve hungered for so
the pink check dress
wrinkling a long time
as things inside

unchained were saying
yes, yes tho I didn’t

---

Cabbages, Leaves and Morphine

In Brooklyn, everything
smelled of cabbages
and plaster, at least that
time they gave me
morphine. In Providence,
your room smelled
that way too. When
we opened the windows
leaves came in the room.
After love, I took the
dishes out of the
bathtub and let the
sun and water eat me

I’d drive 3 hours and
you’d have dinner.
We found Snodgrass,
Conrad, Hadas (his
blue blue eyes). I
let you touch Dylan
Thomas tho he was
mine. Sometimes the
cat didn’t piss in the
corner and how.
Mondays when I left at
noon there were always
leaves to walk thru.
Then you wrote a poem
about your lonely
bed on Tuesday

Your eyes blue too,
something in my blood
running away from them
and I threw a can thru
the glass, the first time
I remember being so
violent but not the last
Sometimes you came to
pull me in snow from that
pink room I lived in where
nobody else spoke English. I
had the cat by then and
somebody different. I
didn’t know what to keep

It wasn’t just my life that
was falling apart. your best friend
finds out he’s schizoid and
can’t turn corners. I dream I’m
knocked up in three states and
leave school, not knowing
what to do. When you come
up to see me you have a rock
in the car you wouldn’t throw
away and a blonde who looks
at my ring and says, “a waste.”
Your eyes say we can’t go
anywhere tho you don’t
even know it. And I didn’t
explain, sending the ring
back without a word. Even
now I 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

     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."