DOING NEW YORK CITY WITH JESUS

He wasn’t always in the country in a manger with cows
or under the stars tho he did like to curl
into my body as if it was his old
swaddling clothes and he liked having hay
and the horses and cows close enough to feel

their breath early in the morning. He could
walk on water, frozen water in upstate New York
near Bethlehem where we picked watercress near the
frozen lake and wintergreen under the stars I never
saw so bright. He told me the name of the star

called Wormwood. We had movable feasts before
days in the city, blackberries he had canned
himself and turkey the woman leaving left
behind. So many fruits of the earth. We spent a
lot of time in the garden later growing marijuana

and corn and then back upstairs to his bed.
“There is no fear in love,” he’d whisper but I got
little work done. In the city we stopped for his
drugs and checked into the Chelsea then headed
for Channel 13 to do a public television show

and while we waited, watched Deep Throat. It just came
out. He didn’t see anything wrong, saw Lovelace unspotted
from the world, just taking in human blessings. J.C.
wanted to help every sinner and later in Soho we reenacted
the Deep Throat plot as if to resist the devil. Or maybe it

was the part where he’s bread and I’m thirsty and he wants
me to eat it. We did have fun. “What is your life. It is a
vapor that appears for a little time and then goes away,” he’d
grin, pulling me down on that glistening pearly in his body.
We did the galleries, Mulberry Street. I saw more roaches

than I would for years. He said they were God’s creatures,
called me angel and inscribed his book about buffalos with love
and I saw it was the word the lover my mother never stayed
with tho she would have used in photographs he signed before
he went to Paraguay to die when she married someone who wasn’t
Christian. It wasn’t the religious part that got in my way though.
It was a time I was still racking up names of lovers like a litany,
had my own house. It was before I was looking for a home in
Jesus or on the shore. His tongue was heavenly but I wasn’t ready

for Eternity or facing life, wasn’t ready for no possibility
of parole

 

JESUS GOES TO THE POETRY SLAM

in disguise. He doesn’t wear his sandals, he even tucks
his long hair under a fedora, doesn’t want to intimidate.
After all, many have called him the poet of poets, said his
words were magical. Maybe he won’t even read tho he loves
an audience. He’s not that ambitious, would rather listen

to the vinegar of other people’s lives. Some in the
room might step away from the microphone in awe or blush
or just stand frozen. Like so much that matters to J.C.,
the reading is in a scuzzy part of town. He sees the
glitter of broken glass as stars, as the light of the world,

the hookers’ rhinestones, not as flash trash, but a candlestick,
a light shining. He hurries along New York Ave. Those who
lust after the women in micro mini sequins and leather are
the adulterers: the women know not what they do. He
thinks this might make a good title for a new poem and jots

it down on his cuff as wind picks up and he walks into the Black
Crab packed with young girls. One wears dark purple rubber
and reads a poem about losing her lover, how that’s why the
mulberry went from white to blood after two other lovers,
Thisbe and Pyramus, die when one sees the other asleep,

thinks the lion chewed him up so he plunges a sword into her
heart and the mulberries go dark red and garnet and Jesus is
          moved.
Another poet reads of doomed love, of dying for love, of
sacrifice being the only end of such deep love and he holds his
breath a moment as someone else in the audience claps until her
          hands

start to bleed like stigmata and she turns to Jesus almost
in a trance saying it was “something to die for”

 

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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