Poetry Posts

ONE MORE NIGHT

of no sleep.
The house creaks,
cat breath. Some
one who seems
an intruder in the
other room. After
email, smoldering,
cryptic enough
where anything
could have been
imagined, what
burned turned to
ice. Hot Austin
nights and then the
months of even
in Paris going over
your fingers that
never moved close
as in dreams.
Cold lips. I checked
e mail in terror
and only when I
stopped caring, a
blue plum card,
his “all of the
missing,” how he
looked for me in San
Antonio and even
across the table in
Austin and then
the bolt: “indeed,
why didn’t we?”

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“INDEED, WHY DIDN’T WE?”

There, like a tongue
any place you can
imagine it could go.
Before, e mails
were hotter than
Austin nights.
Electrical, I know
what burned could
scorch. You were safe
in paper. In reviews,
it’s an e mail
affair. They can’t
feel the flame of your
thigh after three
margaritas. Or that
I shook that my
body wasn’t
perfect enough. A
hunk others
gasped and of
course there were
the bare armed
young girls in their
summer dresses.
You write, “missing
in action love, and,
indeed, why
didn’t we?” and
this slick grey I slog
thru shines and
now, as if seven years
hadn’t dissolved.
I imagine the ache
in La Rosa bar,
drunk on lust or
wanting, that
longing for what
those thick musky
nights I haven’t
felt since

INDEED, WHY DIDN’T WE?   ©  Lyn Lifshin 2012

Lyn ‘s Website

Bio Notes

Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 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.

If you enjoyed INDEED, WHY DIDN’T WE? you might visit Motherbird and read Lyn’s Dream Poem

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