°•. KISS, BABY, THE NEW FILM by Lyn Lifshin

   
               a much more rare obsession than mine, tho 
               in some ways, not that different. The woman 
               in love with what’s dead, what’s given up 
               on breathing, caring, could be me knocking 
               my knuckles raw on your metal door while 
               you gulp another beer, put your head down 
               on the table. With you, it often was like 
               singing to someone in a casket the lid was 
               already down on, still expecting something. 
               She buried animals in the woods, didn’t mind 
               touching them. Though I made our nights into 
               something more, I could have been coiled 
               close to a corpse. No, that part is a lie. Your 
               body was still warm. It was everything inside 
               where your heart must have been that was 
               rigid, ice. The woman in the film went to work, 
               an embalming assistant. Isn’t that what I’m 
               doing? Keeping you with words? Embracing 
               you on the sheet of this paper, a tentative 
               kiss on cold lips, the cuddling of cadavers? 
               In the film, the woman says loving the dead is 
               “like looking into the sun without going blind, 
               is like diving into a lake, sudden cold, then 
               silence.” She says it was addictive. I know about 
               the cold and quiet afterward, how you were a 
               drug. If she was spellbound by the dead, who 
               would say I wasn’t, trying to revive, resuscitate 
               someone not alive who couldn’t feel or care 
               with only the shell of the body. Here, where no 
               body can see, I could be licking your dead body 
               driving thru a car wash. I could be whispering 
               to the man across the aisle, “bodies are addictive.” 
               Our word for the loved and the dead are the same, 
               the beloved, and once you’ve had either while you  
               have them, you don’t need any other living people 
               in your life 

Lyn Lifshin’s recent 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. ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME will be published by Black Sparrow-David Godine in 2005. (ORDER@GODINE) Also recently published is A NEW FILM ABOUT A WOMAN IN LOVE WITH THE DEAD, March Street Press. She has published more than 100 books of poetry, including MARILYN MONROE, BLUE TATTOO, won awards for her non fiction and edited 4 anthologies of women’s writing including TANGLED VINES, ARIADNE’S THREAD and LIPS UNSEALED. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of an award winning documentary film, LYN LIFSHIN: NOT MADE OF GLASS, available from Women Make Movies. Her poem, “No More Apologizing” has been called “among the most impressive documents of the women’s poetry movement,” by Aicia Ostriker.” An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical series, “On The Outside, Lips, Blues, Blue Lace,” was published Spring 2003. She is working on a collection of poems about the famous, short lived beautiful race horse, Ruffian: THE LICORICE DAUGHTER. MY YEAR WITH RUFFIAN to be published by TEXAS REVIEW PRESS. New chapbooks include WHEN A CAT DIES and ANOTHER WOMAN’S STORY and forthcoming chapbooks include MAD GIRL POEMS, BARBIE POEMS. A new collection, Persephone, will be published by Red Hen Press. For interviews, photographs, more bio material, reviews, interviews, prose, samples of work and more, her web site is www.lynlifshin.com