Carla Negron: Abstract Artist from Puerto Rico

"I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico since I was a little girl I had this curiosity towards the creative process and my family noticed and took action with my life and nourished these interests with art. My art journey has been very reveling and living surrounded by so many beautiful colors in this tropical island had given me my vibrant colors of expression and sexy organic forms of composition. I enjoy deeply painting and want to meet and exchange ideas with fellow artists."

Visit her site at http://www.saatchionline.com/CarlaNegron 

Watch this video in which Carla talks about her art.  Even if you don't speak Spanish you will gain important insight into the artist's perspective.

Kinections: Dance Therapy with Dr. Fraenkel

LivingDance™ works with natural forms of movement that are intrinsic to the art of dance: breath, muscle connection, shape, beat, etc. These relate directly to how we feel about ourselves, how we function, and how we relate to others. By combining the creative and the kinesthetic, LivingDance attends to personal and professional growth.

LivingDance combines kinesthetic sensing, Somato-Respiratory Integration™, improvisational dance, authentic movement, and music to:

• reduce stress
• tap emotions and sensations that people ordinarily avoid
• improve relationships with others
• build self-confidence
• define boundaries
• be assertive or intimate without losing one's sense of self
• create charisma
• break through creative blocks
• remain present
• express oneself authentically through dance, movement, music, writing, and art making

LivingDance synthesizes current knowledge of human development, creativity, dance, counseling, and the body-mind connection. People of all ages and sizes benefit. Neither dance training nor talent is required.

Most people had the skills LivingDance works with before they went to kindergarten. How they got lost varies. LivingDance provides opportunities to reclaim these hidden or lost ways of being in the world. Moreover, everyone can do so at a pace that suits them best.

Danielle L. Fraenkel, Ph.D., BC-DMT, NCC, LCAT, LMHC, CGP, founder and director of Kinections, has been a dance/movement therapist for more than three decades. She developed LivingDance to teach people how to use the joy of creative movement to make positive, lasting changes in their lives. LivingDance synthesizes current knowledge of human development, creativity, dance, counseling, and bodymind integrity. 

Schooled in both counseling and dance/movement therapy, Dr. Fraenkel is an innovator. She founded the department of dance/movement therapy at Hillside Children's Center, brought dance/movement therapy to the Rochester Eating Disorders Organization and Heritage Christian Services, and introduced LivingDance to The Genesee Hospital and Unity Hospital's Partial Hospitalization Eating Disorders program. As the first dance/movement therapist at The Healing Connection, a Partial Hospitalization Program for adolescents and adults struggling with eating disorders, Dr. Fraenkel regularly continues to share the healing inherent in LivingDance. She has also brought LivingDance to Greece, Israel, Asia, and to different parts of the USA. 

Educator and published writer, Dr. Fraenkel teaches formal, alternate route and continuing education courses at the graduate level. Topics include dance/movement therapy, counseling, and nonverbal communication. Recently she has developed an innovative course that integrates verbal and nonverbal methods of clinical intervention. Students felt all dance/movement therapists and other clinicians as well should take it. More informally, Dr. Fraenkel teaches professionals, parents, and employees LivingDance skills to reduce stress, increase feelings of effectiveness, and improve communication skills.

Visit http://www.kinections.com

BLOOD AND RAIN by B.L Morgan, reviewed by BL Kennedy

Blood and Rain

B.L Morgan

Stone Garden.net Publishing

Danville, CA

260 pgs

$12.95

ISBN: 1-60076-067-8

There are reasons for all the things that I do. You may not understand them. Hell I might not understand them, but there are reasons. It’s Saturday night, raining lightly. I’m driving in my car, a tan Olds Delta Eighty-Eight. Just driving, watching the streaks made by the streetlights and the blinking neon lights from the taverns.

What can I say about Blood and Rain: A John Dark Shocker? Just that, I wish I had something to say about this book. But I don’t. Oh, I can tell you its well written and very entertaining, but overall, I felt like I was missing out on the mythology of its main character, John Dark. I feel that anybody who comes across Blood and Rain without having read the previous John Dark books will be just as lost as I am. Its that place where a critic never wants to be that I find myself in; part of me really likes this book, and part of me wants to dropkick it out my living room window. Either way, its going to up to each individual reader. So, yeah, purchase a copy of Blood and Rain. Or better yet, figure out which book is the first in the series and start there. 

Honoring Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a federal holiday observed annually in the United States on the last Monday of May.Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it originated after the American Civil War to commemorate the Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died in all wars. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.

Many people visit cemeteries and memorials, particularly to honor those who have died in military service. Many volunteers place an American flag on each grave in national cemeteries.

By the early 20th century, Memorial Day was an occasion for more general expressions of memory, as people visited the graves of their deceased relatives in church cemeteries, whether they had served in the military or not. It also became a long weekend increasingly devoted to shopping, family gatherings, fireworks, trips to the beach, and national media events such as the Indianapolis 500 auto race, held since 1911 on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.

Annual Decoration Days for particular cemeteries are held on a Sunday in late spring or early summer in some rural areas of the American South, notably in the mountains. In cases involving a family graveyard where remote ancestors as well as those who were deceased more recently are buried, this may take on the character of an extended family reunion to which some people travel hundreds of miles. People gather on the designated day and put flowers on graves and renew contacts with kinfolk and others. There often is a religious service and a "dinner on the ground," the traditional term for a potluck meal in which people used to spread the dishes out on sheets or tablecloths on the grass. It is believed that this practice began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the "memorial day" idea.

^{text from Wikipedia}     

The Art of Claudio Parentela

Born in Catanzaro (1962-Italy) where he lives and works…Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist,and free- lance journalist . He has been active for many years in the international contemporary art scene. He has collaborated and he collaborates with many zines and magazines of contemporary art,  literary and of comics in Italy and in the world...both on the paper and on the web...including the NYArtsMagazine,Turntable & Blue Light Magazine.

CLAUDIO PARENTELA
VIA F.CRISPI N.79
88100 CATANZARO-ITALY

E-Mail: claudio.parentela@alice.it

Writing in English as a Second Language by Walter Ruhlmann

Writing in English as a Second Language

first published in Magnapoets July 2010 issue. Revised for The Gypsy Art Show Blog.

English has always been a language I felt acquainted with, even before I could actually speak it fluently. My parents had lived over seven years in California and I had been kept amazed in this atmosphere of souvenirs from a dreamed America, stuck in the late 50s, early 60s, with my parents twenty or thirty years younger, and my big brother in nappies or shorts.

All these images on super 8 films and photographs never made me jealous nor did they make me sad not to have been part of the experience – I was not born yet. They just filled me with wonder and encouraged me to know more about English and all the countries and cultures related to it.

It took over another decade for me to be able to live my dream and go abroad, just across the English Channel. Bath, Cirencester, Manchester – three cities I have lived in. Three cities in which I got used to not only speaking English and put aside my mother tongue for a while but to start dreaming and writing in English.

As far as I can remember, the starting point was when Dr. Teresinka Pereira – a teacher at Bluffton College, Ohio – sent me her poems and suggested I translated them into French. Soon, her words on paper and the life I was living then pulled me towards an exercise I would not have thought be ready for: putting my own words on paper in a language which had just been a topic of study and a useful vehicle of needs and services.

English had suddenly taken the shape of a language to transpose my thoughts, emotions, feelings, frights, joys, phantasms, desires, repulsions, dreams and nightmares on paper.

The funny thing is that writing in English is less exhausting, less draining, asks less efforts from me than writing in French.

I could not explain it really, but I am so fond of English and American literature, always read, watch and listen more works from artists of English culture that I guess words in English come more naturally to me than French words do.

In the late 1990s, Teresinka Pereira was the first editor to trust me with English and published two small booklets with short collections of poetry of mine[1].

Then, I came back to France, had to fulfil my military duties  – they still existed at the time – during which I wrote a collection of poems entitled Hospital of the Armies and which was written the way poets such as Harry R. Wilkens, Erich von Neff or Pradip Chouduri, all English-speaking poets from various parts of the globe, write poems themeselves.

I also used English to write this collection in order to hide all the negative thoughts I expressed against the French navy and the waste of time and ludicrousness this period implied. It was also to hide the rather crude sexual images inside it. I could not be sure these pages would not be read by one of my superiors or one of the “crew members”. It was writing in English as the most debased way to write: under a mask or doing auto censure.

I then got several part-time jobs, went back to University, carried on writing – too little – and publishing mgversion2>datura (ex-Mauvaise graine)[2], stopped to concentrate on my new job as a TESL (Teacher of English as a Second Language), moved places several times and English came back slowly as a means to write poetry and fiction.

The thrill had come back to me and has not ceased since then. Over the last seven years, I have had the opportunity to meet more and more English-speaking poets, writers and artists, translate their works, publish them, and be able to publish my own poems in various magazines.

Each time I receive a positive answer to my submissions, I am filled with pride and amazement. Pride because you are never totally accustomed to being published even after fifteen years or so of relationship with editors and magazines – well, I am not. Amazement because it took me less than five years to be published quite widely in English, American, Canadian... blogs and magazines – whether with translations of my own works or with original English material – when it had taken me over a decade to be recognized as a poet on the French-speaking scene[3].

It took me just a few weeks to have my first genuine collection of poetry in English – De Maore (From Mayotte) – accepted by Lapwing Publishing (Belfast, Northern-Ireland) when I am still struggling to have another one written in French accepted by any French publishers. I guess even my early works is filled with images and symbols that have more impact and are more meaningful to English-speaking readers than French-speaking ones. This I suppose is one of the other reasons why I chose to write in English, even sometimes translating my earlier poems in this language

I discovered the Anglo-American culture at school first and plunged into it when I sat at University. This language is useful in everyday life and to discover the world, it is a language you cannot do without. It has allowed me not only to communicate with many people all around the globe, and probably still will, but also to discover my own world, my inside world, all the abilities beyond my knowledge. Discover yet another part of my own conscience.

Walter RUHLMANN

Nantes, May 21, 2012

---

[1]    Space Unconsciousness and Fireflies, IWA Editions, 1997.

[2]    A literature magazine published and printed from 1996 to 2000 now on line and available in print through lulu.com

[3]    Writing in French allowed me to be published in French as well as Swiss and Belgian magazines.

TRANSCENDENTAL TELEMARKETER by Beth Copeland

· Paperback: 100 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-088-0

  $16.00

Copeland’s Transcendental Telemarketer contains beautiful lyrics of emotion and meditation, but it also contains rants against war and violence, and all the while it swings us from the U.S. to Japan to Afghanistan, from Islam to Buddhism to Christianity It’s compelling, playful, and well-crafted. —William Allegrezza, author of Fragile Replacements

sample poems:

Still Life With One Apple

From earliest memory: one apple
in a bowl predating speech, spores

of sunlight floating on air like pollen
from the garden of Hesperides.

In childhood I wanted everything in pairs,
animals entering Noah's ark two by two,

the symmetry of hand in hand,
bride and groom.

I thought the apple needed another apple
or at least the company of an orange or pear,

that the apple was lonely, that everything—
even an apple in a bowl—

had a soul. Was it wrong to believe
the apple could suffer and bleed,

to project my own needs
onto that fruit?

To believe only a membrane
of matter and speed

separates blood from stone
and bone from apple seed?

To see the apple as a symbol
of the universal soul,

as in Georgia O’Keefe’s “Green
Apple on Black Plate,”

a study in simplicity?
Still Life With An Empty Bowl—

I ate the apple to make it whole.

My Life as a Slut

Age 6: A boy finds a penny on the playground. He says he’ll give it to me if I go in a closet, take off all my clothes, and let him look. My sister says, “Don’t,” but I do it, anyway.

Age 21: My mother calls me a “harlot,” “Jezebel,” and “strumpet” after I stay out all night with my boyfriend. I roll my eyes and say, “If we’re going to have this conversation, at least update your vocabulary. The word is ‘slut.’”

Age 16: A teacher tells me to kneel in the girls’ bathroom. Am I supposed to pray for forgiveness? I get sent home from school because my skirt doesn’t touch the floor.

Age 27: I walk down the aisle in an off-white satin dress. It’s snowing, and the next day I lose my voice.

Age 20: I have sex with three different men in one week. I write their names on my calendar in wisteria-blue ink.

Age 10: At recess I tell Tommy Faircloth I’m going to be a stripper when I grow up. Tommy tattles to the teacher, who scolds him and says I’m a good girl. I would never say a terrible thing like that.

Age 32: A man at my college reunion tells me a lot of other girls in our class were sluttier than I was. I feel like a failure.

Age 23: I fall in love with a Vietnam vet who plays guitar and writes bad poetry. I sleep with him on the first date. He dumps me for a frumpy girl who waits until the second date.

Age 9: I’m walking down the sidewalk wearing short-shorts, and a teenage boy leans out a car window and yells, “Call me when you’re 16!”

Age 30: I buy a bar of Saints and Sinners soap in New Orleans. My husband says it’s a rip-off.

Age 18: I get drunk at a party and lose my virginity. The next morning hot water runs down my thighs in a stream of silver and blood.

Age 5: I’m afraid of dogs, strangers, and the dark. Shadows cast by tree branches and leaves on the bedroom wall look like the devil’s face. Do I hear footsteps in the stairwell? I’m afraid I‘ll die in my sleep. I know I’m going to Hell.

About the poet:  Beth Copeland lived in Japan, India, and North Carolina as a child. Her book Traveling Through Glass received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and have received awards from Atlanta Review, North American Review, The North Carolina Poetry Society, and Peregrine. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an English instructor at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She lives in a log cabin in the country with her husband, Phil Rech.

Tribute to Carol Novack

Mad Hatters' Review Issue 13:  Tribute to Carol Novack






Carol Novack, (RIP 1948 - 2011), founded Mad Hatters’ Review in 2005, was the former recipient of a writer’s award from the Australian government, author of a poetry chapbook, and an erstwhile criminal defense and constitutional lawyer in NYC. In 2010, she moved from a Greenwich Village co-op to a mountain residence (future “retreat” for individuals and collaborators) in Western North Carolina, importing her KGB Bar reading series, “Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes” to The Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, and founding the non-profit arts organization, MadHat, Inc.

Carol’s collection of fictions, fusions, monologues and poems, Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, was published in Fall 2010 by Spuyten Duyvil Press. The book is beautifully illustrated, mainly by artists who’ve graced the pages of Mad Hatters’ Review.

The late poet, Hugh Fox called the collection: “THE most seductive, original, impacting work I have seen for years. A fascinating combination of Kerouacian street-talk plus a trip through the museum of Modern Art in Chicago, plus a nod-off to Kosty's furthest out experimentalism. Magnifique!”

Teachings of Death 

I

affirmation sticks to me
like a porcupine’s quill

the dumb animal death—instinctively
a woman who has lain with pigs
keeps me going

where lions hunt
desires
silent in the bog

II

that wizened woman who has lain with goats
opens doors
that had been breathing

under closed lids

I watch her aghast
the air smelling briefly of love
breezes by humming
an old French song

the voice of the woman
has been extinguished
by its own extravagance
has been taken in
by wind
which makes gutteral sounds
inside

my body
so surprised by the opening
of doors

III

she speaks of that man
as if he were holy

her voice of bodies
closely woven
as knots of paradise
lovers

she wags her wand
& takes me back
to his shadow

as light deceives
it seems the shade
of a mountain
cast from her wand

‘climb’ she says
lifting her breasts

death’s tongue
flies away
wavering its notes
high above
the mountain

& i am alone
all sinew & bone
wrapped in the flesh
of his shadow

 by Carol Novack

                                                                 photo by Jeff Davis

The Art of James D. Pendleton

From the artist:  Born 1946 in Houston, Texas and that meant that I had the benefits of coming of age during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, action painting, Op, Pop, minimalism, conceptualism, the works but none of that had the impact upon me that Andrew Wyeth’s masterpiece, ‘Christina’s World’ delivered. Resting comfortably within that technically superb painting was the sort of surreal juxtapositions of objects and figure that made me want to communicate in that same manner. Not that I didn’t like the work of Barnet Newman, Joan Mitchell or Jackson Pollock but I didn’t enjoy the cold intellectualism that surrounded the abstract, and maybe there was a feeling of The Emperor’s New Clothes that I got from the criticism of the times. So, I took a degree in Commercial Art and set out to paint in the style of the great illustrators. 

 

However, commercial work required the auspices of a committee to make all decisions regarding subject matter and even message. In my last week of classes, my most influential professor, William Kolbe took me aside and explained that I’d never be happy under such control and with that, I understood that I needed to go back to the very basics of painting and work toward what would please me. In that same year, I married Martha Susan Black and we took our meager monies to Europe where there was art that I’d only known in printed matter.
 
Coming to face the works in the Louvre, the Prado or the Tate showed me two things. One was that I knew almost nothing about painting and the other was that I felt that I could do as well if I set down to do it, and so we returned home. Our lives became structured around Martha pursuing her career and me staying home to paint and be house dad to our daughter, Virginia Anne.
 
Having the material and more importantly, the spiritual support from Martha allowed me to forget trying to place myself into a comfortable niche, somewhere in the world of art. There was some success in this, a solo show at a Houston gallery and modest sales but there was also the lure of the works that I’d not seen in Europe. So, we took off again and stopped on the way in NYC where I found that nobody wanted to even see figurative paintings, certainly no nudes and there was an apprenticeship of gallery association that would eventually lead me to the top of the list of painters, once I readjusted my ‘style’. However, I met the extremely affable fellow, Ward Jackson, then director at the Guggenheim. While no one else would bother, he took the better part of an afternoon to look at my work and counseled me to continue what I was doing and told me that Paris would be the place to do it.
 
Paris was all that it can be and my work found acceptance, a solo show, some good reviews and more art to study. Of course, there are always issues of visas, overstayed welcomes and forced return to home to recharge the bank account. However, we eventually found ourselves back in Paris, then in England on the Welsh border and down to Spain; always following the art and sometimes the better exchange rates for the dollar.
 
This also meant that I’d almost totally removed myself from anything like the mainstream. However, it was in Paris that I found the little book on the works of Egon Schiele, by Dr. Alessandra Comini, the professor emeritus at SMU. Schiele hit me like a thunderclap. Here was this consummate painter who treated art much in the way that I was trying to do. His subject matter offended many, his behavior was anathema to his peers and countrymen but more importantly, he painted women in the manner that, in my mind was precisely the way they should be seen: wonderful in their being and sublime in their presence.

So, nearly ten years after leaving art school, I was finally comfortable with what I was doing. Soon, we moved to Oaxaca, Mexico and a year and a half of what can be best described as color saturation that filled in more gaps in my understanding of art and how it serves people.
 
This last twenty five years has been spent in the gradual evolution of becoming the painter that I am today. It has been a most satisfying life and filled with meeting very interesting people of diverse backgrounds, a phenomenon that occurs often within the art world. My work has taken on a sort of life of its own. Few pieces are planned and all of them grow within the confines of what is suggested on the canvas rather than my own personal dictum.
 
Is this work any good? Perhaps. There are those who over the years have collected my art, there are those who have offered places to stay and to paint uninterrupted by outside pressures of hustling the rent and food money. In fact, one could say that it is the impact of my work on others that has kept this activity going. As a painter, one is totally aware that there are far more pressures working against a life in art than there are to support it. Every day is a blessing.

Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous, movie review by Travis Hedge Coke

“A vanity production beyond all reason.” - Roger Ebert

Masked and Anonymous was a movie that couldn't win for being made of win. Bob Dylan cowriting and starring in a movie about a strong messianic singer full of flaws and just freed from a stint in prison (as represented by a disused entrance at the LA Zoo) to play a benefit concert? It's ego when words are put in the mouths of characters lauding him or fearing his fame; it's ego when Dylan's own character, Jack Fate, says “I was always a singer and maybe no more than that.” He's faking humble, you see. And in a vanity film, no less. Because the worst thing any artist can do is put their own money and time into doing something that won't make them more money or more famous.

And, sure, Masked and Anonymous is pretentious. But, in an age of so many movies that aren't trying at all, isn't it worthwhile to reach out and let your reach exceed its grasp? In the movie, it is asked, “Would you reach out to a dying man, if while reaching, you thought he might pull you in?” And, sure there's a reflex answer. A Sensible answer. Loads of answers. But what's the good answer? What's the value of the question and what's missing from it?

On one level, this is just Larry Charles and Bob Dylan scripting dialogue for celebrities while they tour a camera around town to a soundtrack of Dylan covers, covers of Dylan, and new Dylan recordings. It's entirely made of stunt casting, meta-reference casting, from the roadies (Chris Penn and Christian Slater) to the dying American President (Richard Sarafian), entirely shot in LA (with the exception of stock footage), deliberately elliptical and even a “man eating chicken” joke is played utterly deadpan. But Larry Charles and Bob Dylan sending a film crew around on a tour of LA with dialogue is really rather beautiful. It's a gorgeous city and deserves to look gorgeous in a movie. Why not show off a locale if you can? Why not take your stunt caste or your menagerie and display them amidst bon mots and lights?

Mickey Rourke is great stunt casting, sure, and that should be – and is – embraced, but he also cleans up nice and wicked as the Vice President of America, half Andrew Jackson, half Dick Cheney, all sniffs and dismissal and undercurrents of raging envy. Charles and Dylan don't have to know that 2003 was a good year for political and religious commentary in a movie, they just stick their hand out and feel around. Good year or not, you don't know if it's worth trying without trying. Same reasoning, I imagine, fueled the casting of Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in a dynamic wherein Bridges is the asshole. And what an ass he is! Bridges' Tom Friend is a brutal, pig-headed justice-minded journalist who clearly writes his answers for an interview before he asks his questions.

The bulk of critics hated Bridges role and his meanness, by the way. Several took his assaults as the thoughts of Dylan, directly, including Hendrix as the lonely sad boy whose forefathers were the pilgrims, and Janis Joplin, super-capitalist. This is, to my knowledge, the only movie where someone (Jessica Lange) put their hand between their legs and breathed funny and critics came out saying they weren't sure what happened in that scene. It's unbecoming of a critic to suggest critics are stupid, so I'll just let that rest there where you can reread it if you have to.

I'm not suggesting the movie is simple or that the makers had huge, brilliant special knowledge that motivated all of it, but I will say that Val Kilmer's bit with the rabbit is the best explanation of what bunnies have to do with the death and resurrection of Christ and it was a sad, funny, engrossing scene that, as most moments in the movie accomplish, expands to be relevant to the entirety of Masked and Anonymous. I'm not sure many unpretentious movies manage that, and those that do probably don't have as good a soundtrack.

BALLROOM POEMS by Lyn Lifshin

 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. 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."

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. 

   

WHEN YOU TURN

CHA CHA

INTO A MAD GIRL

POEM

and I didn’t plan to do it.

When this dangerous tango

slams me from despair

to a five-margarita high,

to look back would be a

guillotine. When no rumba

is torture, when all that

matters, all that is real is

fantasy. Just your eyes and

the v in my bikini is soaking.

I can barely imagine

surviving anything more

invasive. Each deep look

a bruise that doesn’t fade

WHEN

THERE ARE MARIACHIS

when breakfast and lunch

are martinis. When

sheets smell of rose,

Bulgarian rose, Tuber

rose, that dark rose

in a bottle on my dresser,

musky as skin. When

it’s bolero or rumba.

When we leave the

room, and there is no

cat puke to clean up,

no terror of what’s

ahead. When you hold

me, should you hold me

YOUR EYES

IN THE CROWDED

ROOM

I’m in for it

now, not that longing

isn’t what I wanted,

feeling that alive

No wonder I’m not

the only one sure

it’s you. Their skin’s

been torched.

I’m stunned by the

day’s tattoo where

your fingers held me

                                                                 Belinda Subraman and Lyn Lifshin
                                                    You might want to hear this interview with Lyn Lifshin .