Marilyn Monroe Dreams of Growing
            Her Own Penis Under Roots of Trees

It’s been 33 years she thinks, lying back under
damp ivy, long enough for other movers and
shakers to do what had to be done.
Being dead’s a little like being in a

bomb shelter. Cozy she thinks and peace and
quiet were enough for so long. Only now,
she thinks of a bone that wasn’t her hop or
wrist, wasn’t her ankles on a grate

mosquitos clawed as they blew air up under
her red dress, even her lips down there
going rosy. She knows how long it’s been
since she’s had more than enough other

flesh wedge up inside them close as a Siamese
twin but never as comforting, never there
just for her long enough. She feels the leaves
mulch her toes, her grey hair cradling her

bones, a better pillow than a man who’ll roll away,
keep her awake snoring. For a year she dreamt of
another set of boobs she’d hip hop all night
with, watching men drool. What a relief to be out

with a joined twin, on her own but not lonely,
someone who’d be there not only at the moment
of death, but even after. She imagines something moving
between her thighs that isn’t her own hand, in its

bracelet of need but a bud, a bloom, a flesh lily
she won’t have to shave what’s left of her legs for, that
can fill her up, moving gently, as if she was a virgin
(and she might as well have been it’s been so long),

knowing exactly what she wants and where to move it,
linked to her heart, there for as long
as she needs it, oozing crystals she’s heard
are the rage and then like a kitten embryo

that won’t be born and leave the mother’s
fur or make a mess or claw or stake its
own territory, be resorbed back into
her blood maybe to swell and bloom

again under an apricot hunger moon

 

Jesus and Marilyn

It had to do with them both being stars, being
hounded, adored, yet suspected of not being
what they seemed. Both felt they had to take
on new names when they started their mission
but tho in the spotlight, both cherished

a quiet simple life, privacy, But everything
pushed them to mingle with strangers. When
Marilyn called Jesus the night she first
thought of taking pills and was crying, moaning
“Who shall deliver me from death,” Jesus

came right to her side and he held her
close. Their blonde hair braiding together,
his lips comforting her lips. “Let not your
heart be troubled,” he begged her, “I judge
not.” He promised more than all the senators

and baseball players could. Diamonds, he
told her, won’t comfort like my love. He talked
about stars, told her it doesn’t matter if
you’ve gained 10 pounds or feel at 33 it’s over.
Then he told her something that Marilyn might
have misunderstood, something about dying to

live in the sky forever. And since she wanted to
follow him, being in her mid-30’s too, when he
left in a blaze of triumph, left the earth with such
fanfare and weeping of his fans and even
his enemies so no one could forget him, Marilyn
left too

 

He Could Get Rid of a Fever,
             He Could Make a Woman Come


Jesus really was amazing but there’s things nobody
knows. Sure you’ve heard how he made a blind man see,
how his snow-like touch sucked away any fevers. It’s
true, he could hear the ebbing of sap in maples,
talk to it with his hands. I heard him whisper to the

rust under steel near the back door. He worked on
women who never had had an orgasm the way he wouldn’t
give up on the ugliest, grungiest piece of wood or
wreckage half underwater in a basement of mold that he
kept at, hammering and rubbing, smoothing and scraping
         and

banging and standing back and then going at it all again,
where an ordinary man would have given up, shrugged and
wiped his hands of it. He was not like anyone else
but seemed amazed at the wonders of earth, at sky
flowers that bloom when night is on earth like a

woman arching and quivering, all in a burst, a burst of
sweet wetness and then how the day hid the stars, hid
my nipples and clit. It never ceased to amaze him, the
loveliness of life, the sowing of seeds, how the leaves
come back, like the blood in his penis, miraculous,

the proof of God

 
from the book Before It's Light chapter: Red Velvet G-Strings And Apricot Sighs
 
  
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."

A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead

     Almost every woman I know has had at least one heart-wrenching experience with a "bad news" boyfriend, and Lyn Lifshin is no exception. In this new collection of 103 poems she chronicles her own relationship with such a man, one who happened to be a popular radio personality, yet possessed a chilly heart. She tells her tale in a sequence of poems that reads like a novel, spanning the length of the relationship from beginning to end, including a period of time years later when she learns he has died of cancer....

Laura Stamps

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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