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      September 16, 2021Lyn LifshinWhen He Says You Never Write Any Good Poems About Me

      I think by “good” he means “sexy.” Poems
      about stopping on back roads in the car with
      a bigger front seat, not even waiting for
      a road off a road but pulling velvet and denim
      off like roast skin from a turkey. I don’t tell
      him, maybe I should but the poems dripping
      love juice and pubic hair were written when
      I wasn’t getting any. A virgin after eight years,
      my mind was never not on erotic movies in
      my head where even the music was the in and
      out of bodies. I had time in the raised ranch
      to dream a man would emerge from the trees,
      fantasize slow afternoons behind chiffon drapes
      in the bed of white silk until it ripped. Years my
      arms ached for more than the tiger cats and
      the buff kitten. If a man wrote me from some
      coast I opened on paper to him, came on to
      strangers and convicts on the page. Those sheets
      always felt safe enough to let them know their
      words got me wet, even my hair was horny. I
      wrote about what wasn’t there, what left a hole
      I was terrified I’d drown in. “Writing like a hippie
      but living like a nun,” a magazine quoted me
      and probably I said it. It was the way those in
      the concentration camp talked of food, of seeing
      light, the moon, were famished for the smell of
      bread. Fantasized chicken, apples, beef, all the things
      they’d never thought much about when they had
      more than they could devour as, baby, I do now.

      from Issue #15 - Summer 2001

      Lyn Lifshin

      “Poetry and ballet are like breathing to me. These are my main obsessions, along with Abyssinian cats, velvet, blues, the sound of geese in blackness, raspberry coffee, roses, stained glass and colored beads. My happy time comes from reading short stories on the metro returning from ballet lessons.”