Painting by Henry Asencio

With You It Was

With you it was
like being with the
Hawaiian spirits,
Night Marchers. They
haven’t gone, jumped
to the other world
but are stuck in a ghost
like state to wander.
Who knows where you
are during the day but if
there is a full moon,
you’re there. With you
I feel like those houses
that ghosts walk right
thru, not that I haven’t
left the doors to every
thing I have open. You
still fill dreams. Some
time I’m sure what
chokes me is you.
Choking ghost, other
worldly player. Other
times I feel you are
right there, on the quilt,
in the stained blue sheet.
You “talk storied” me
till I believed it. When I
write your name, I
feel your fingers. In
last night’s dream I
couldn’t push you away

Lyn Lifshin’s prizewinning book (Paterson Poetry Award) Before It’s Light was published Winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow Press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997. The Licorice Daughter was published in February 2006 and Another Woman who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow-David Godine in October 2006. (order@godine.com) Also books include A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead, March Street Press, Marilyn Monroe, When a Cat Dies, Another Woman’s Story,Barbie Poems, The Daughter I Don’t Have, What Matters Most, and Blue Tattoo. Lifshin has won awards for her non-fiction and edited four anthologies of women’s writing including Tangled Vines, Ariadne’s Thread and Lips Unsealed. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines. Her poem “No More Apologizing” has been called “among the most impressive documents of the women’s poetry movement” by Alicia Ostriker. An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical Series, “On the Outside, Lips, Blues, Blue Lace,” was published in Spring, 2003. Texas Review Press published her poems about the famous, short-lived, beautiful race horse, Ruffian: The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian. New books include Mirrors, August Wind, Novemberly and just out spring 2008, 92 Rapple Drive and Desire. She is working on a collection about poets,Poets, (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially the Lies will be published by World Parade and Tsunami will come from Blue Heron Press. Other forthcoming books include a book about the courageous and riveting race horse, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness from Texas Review Press, Nutley Pond from Goose River Press, Lost in the Fog from Finishing Line Press, Persephone from Red Hen. For interviews, more bio material, photographs, reviews, a contact, interviews and samples of her work, browse this website: www.lynlifshin.com.