Before It's Light:

 
Ladies Room, National Archives

as if part of history
too, the wooden
toilets still have
pull chains, marble
floors you can see
where the traffic’s
been by the way the
shiny black veins
are dull. it’s hard
for more than two to
wait in the narrow
space, air think as
fingernails on a
mummy. If there were
ghosts of any dead
presidents’ wives,
they’d pick this bath-
room I imagine: shadowy,
genteel. Echoes of well
dressed women laughing.
Now hardly anyone at
the noon film isn’t
old, wearing brown
or rose madder, slightly
frayed like the room.
Everything in this
light is muted, flung
into the past so when
you take the 5th floor
elevator down to exit
on Constitution or
Pennsylvania Ave. the
bright light stings

 

Carl’s Department Store Bathroom

On the 3rd floor up past slipcovers and tablecloths. There was even
       an
elevator girl with a black and white uniform who listed each floor’s
       contents,
Ladies’ apparel, china, silver plate until almost halfway into the
       nineties
when Carl’s, the last of 3 department stores downtown took down
       its last Christmas
window, outlasting my mother, who near the end was no longer
       able to tear through
dress racks for bargains, sat thinly on a chair while I brought her
       the flowery

sarong she insisted I try on, too, to be sure i could wear it, since,
       she frowned, “I
can’t even be buried in it.” The price tags were still on it when she
       died. My sister,
too large then to even put it on, kept it as hostage, a souvenir like
       thought would
be my mother’s last trip to my house, we stopped at the store’s café
       she loved,
where so many downtown Schenectady older ladies put on once-
       stylish,

expensive clothes for a late afternoon lunch or tea, where she
       ordered a shake
and cheese sandwich that she barely could swallow, and we
       hurried to the ladies’
room upstairs. Everything in this store was for ladies and girls, not
       women, not
persons. It was the ladiest ladies’ room ever, a whole separate
       sitting room of
pink clothes and pale wicker --- a true rest room where you could
       rest forever,
read, have a cigarette. Sales clerks on break would slip into
rose and shell pink sanctuary, light up a Camel, slip off heels
       that made
their nyloned feet ache. Seventeen shades the color of lips and
       nipples, a
rouge snow, a blood ruby, garnet, cream, peach. Azalea colors in
between. A room for a baby girl’s shower. Rose-scented soap in a
       bowl, paste;
sunset-colored towels to wipe away anything a lady would want

wiped away. Not elegant dark marble, like at Macy’s, but flouncy,
       lacy, fluttery
as the butterfly-fragile ladies mounted in oval frames on the walls,
       who seemed to
have, unlike the rest of us in their pink shadows, nothing to regret
       or worry about

 

In That Thruway Ladies’ Room

Julie sucks every
one and a phone
number scratched
on green painted
steel doors. Pine
Sol, blue water.
Bowls flush even
when nobody’s near
them. Young girls
with mahogany skin
and huge eyes pace
in hip-hugging short
cutoffs. One’s
got her own dusky
child moaning over
the gush of water.
“Gonna get me some
coffee.” Midnight
at the rest stop.
Route 90 unravel-
ing in blackness
and miles to go

 

from the book Before It's Light
 
  
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

• grafitti messageboard •