Those Nights Still Asked for I.D.

tho over 12 years past
legal age, I pulled a
leather mini on,
newly thin thighs
brash and invulnerable,
my knees the prow
of some ship parting
stares in storefront
bars where by morning
glass shimmered
like new ice. I
drank vodka after a
day shaking in the
raised ranch my husband
stalked out of tho I
dove to catch his ankles,
not caring if he dragged
me face down over concrete.
Each separation I lost
10 pounds, as if to
get even or strip
what gave me too many
places to bruise away.
Leather, a new tough skin
and the smoke of the
bar softened edges,
I stepped into where
I couldn’t see, still
willing to let what
came out of that
dark cove spread
thru me like a drink



---

Cat Women

most of us don’t have children,
are apt to wrap closer in what
is soft as baby skin: velvet, moiré,
or the softest pale loose jeans.
But it’s the cats that get us thru,
that we clutch, let curl between
our legs. We can make up what
they’re thinking, interpret their
dreams. Sometimes I go back-
ward in terms of cats, back to the
one that came on my 6th birthday,
scrawny and small but already with
more cats inside her, fur pearls. In
one week six women have written
their cat news. They know none of
us won’t understand. Several dream
of our cats more than we dream of
their dead fathers. I never thought
my cat would outlive my uncle,
my mother. Many of us resemble
cats, not always our own: doe eyes,
long legs, a soft collapsible body.
Someone would suppose it’s the
need to mother but I know it is
nothing like that. We’re mystical
about cats because some nights
we become one, slither away from
a lover’s side, wild to explore what
we sense in darkness, starved for
the prowl, the chase, the leap
from a life so domestic some of
us need to regrow claws, survive
on prey, give up safeness



---

The No More Apologizing,
               The No More Little Laughing Blues

apologizing for going to
school instead of having
a job that made money
or babies

pretending I took the bus
to an office, paper
clips in my ear
and never that I was
reading Wyatt,
writing my own dreams
in the dust under the bed

apologizing for my
hair, wild gypsy
hair that fell out of
every clip the way the
life I started dreaming
of did. Apologizing for
the cats

you know, if someone said my skirt
was too short, I explained
or said sorry, but never that
I finally loved my legs

I spent years apologizing for not
having babies, laughing
when someone pulled
a Baby Gerber jar out
of the closet and held it in
front of my eyes like
it was some damn cross or a star

I should have thrown that
thru the glass, I didn’t
need to explain the music
I liked. On friend said that’s
noise. Another said isn’t denim for

children? Well, I laughed the apologizing
oh I don’t want no trouble laugh
over the years, pretending to cook,
pretending to like babying
my husband

the only place I said what I meant
was in poems. That green was like some
huge forbidden flower that grew so
big it couldn’t even fit in the house,
pulled me out a window
with it toward Colorado

I apologized for being what
they thought a woman was by being
flattered when someone said
you write like a man and for

not being what they thought
a woman, for the cats and leaves
instead of booties, for the poems

When someone said well, how much
do you get paid? you know I pretended,
pretended, pretended, I
couldn’t stop trying to please

the A, the star, the good girl
on the forehead. The spanking
clean haunted half my life.
But the poems had their own life

and mine finally followed
where the poems were growing,
warm paper skin growing
finally in my real bed
until the room stopped spinning for
good the way it used to when I dressed
up in suits and hair spray
pretending to be all those things I
wasn’t: teacher, good girl, lady,
wife. I was writing about cocks and
hair for years before I’d felt,
when I was still making love just
on the sheets of paper

When the poems first came
out, one woman I drove to school with
said, I can’t take this. Another said,
I don’t know, this can’t be the you
I know, so brutal, violent.
Which is the real

The man I was with moved to
the other side of the bed.
This was worse than not having
babies. His mother said they
always knew I was odd

my clothes, my hair,
the books I brought to bed.
They said I never seemed like
one of them

My own family thought it was
OK but I couldn’t I write of things that
were pleasant? They wanted to know how much
I got paid and why I didn’t write
for The Atlantic

Look, I still have trouble saying
no. I want all of you to
care about what I’m thinking,
maybe even to
want my hair

It’s true, I put a no smoking sign up
on the door but twice I have
gotten out ashtrays

But I have stopped being grateful to
be asked to read
or to always have some
lover right there
beside me

it’s still not easy to get off the
phone, tell a young stoned poet
it’s a bore to lie with the
phone in my ear like a
cold rock while he goes on
about the evils of money,
charging it to my phone

But now when I hear myself laughing
the apologizing laugh, I know what
swallowing those black seeds can
do and I spit them out. Like tobacco.
(sometimes men could always
do) Nothing good grows from the
I’m sorry, sorry, only those dark
branches and they will
get you from inside

 
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."