The Termagant and the Task Force
She stood at six-foot-four, a miracle, a freak. Most any wooden floor she walked upon would creak. No window, porch, or door was safe from her physique. When she stomped into town, petunias would wilt and greenery would brown and pails of milk be spilt, and weaker walls fall down and have to be rebuilt. One by one, in her wake new houses rose, improved to withstand such a shake. And some thought it behooved them all to let her quake; but most were still unmoved. A Task Force was assigned to meet her face to face and ask her if she’d mind staying at her own place, but she was not...
Read MoreLyn Lifshin in Wild Violet
Lyn Lifshin was one of the most frequently published poets in Wild Violet, starting in 2005. In case you missed some of her work, this index lists all of her poems that appeared in Wild Violet. Vol. IV Issue 3/4 (Waking World) – Spring/Summer 2005 Extreme Lavender It Was the Blue Distance Vol. VII Issue 2 (World Voyage) – Summer 2008 Rhumba on the Subway On the Afternoon Before the Photographs Vol. VII Issue 3 (Linked Lives) – Winter 2009 Somewhere, The The Ice Maiden Mummy’s 214th S.O.S. In 2010, Wild Violet moved away from a quarterly...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Could Be the Black Clothes in Her Closet
pressed into each other as the dark is into her. An excess of black velvet, black lace, licorice silks and ebony flowers. No thing has room to breathe. No matter she filled 72 bags with clothes to give away but then keeps pulling what has no color around her. Once light and sun filtered thru her rooms, her hair thick. Once her lips were plum and ruby but color’s been sucked from them and what’s left is ghostly, an iced bud no sound comes from. Her closet like her dreams is dark as Bluebeard’s castle. Bats could live invisibly on the gauze of some dresses, in...
Read MoreReading Norman Corwin Dies, 101
I think of the oak sticks on campus then, probably running across slippery dark ice across the quad. I was a radio and TV minor, afternoons among wires and glass with mostly guys from Iraq and Morocco. Somehow it was always sundown when the class ended. How little it mattered in a daze of Corwin’s words, already a world past like Normal Rockwell’s sketches of small towns that would morph into something so unlike those scrubbed faces long before the Internet’s paintbrush. I rushed thru cold on a day of almost snow fog to a dorm room a color I wished for, pale lilac,...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Doesn’t Care Much About Much But the Blues
she aches for what’s left out, the last lines broken as she is. She wakes in a sweat of blackness, can’t move. Pain and sadness come thru the window slats. The cat won’t come to curl into her chin for another hour. If she could drink, she would gulp Wednesday away or beg a wild horse to throw her thru the canyons or have some poisonous snake circle her like a bracelet she will never get rid...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Wants Only What Can’t Stay
the blues man who wrote on the cartoon book she’s in, the only one not in music. She was sure she knew where she could find it but like him, it disappeared. She knew he loved another who wasn’t that into him but in the small room at the colony, he was hers as he is in the drawing a famous artist did of them and the paintings and sketches he did of her nude and...
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