Issue 5: Featured Poet - Lyn Lifshin

(c) Lyn Lifshin

Untitled Country Review is pleased to present new work from our featured poet for Spring-Summer 2011, Lyn Lifshin. William Page’s review of Lifshin’s latest book, a poem from the book, and an interview with Lifshin conducted by Untitled Country editor Scot Siegel follow.

If My Grandmother Could Have Written 
a Postcard to the Sister Left Behind

It would be written

on sand, or on a

hand colored photo

graph of a country

with nobody waiting

with guns, no thatched

roofs on fire, no

hiding in trees after

a knock on the

door: Sister, it is

nothing like we had

or what we imagined.

There are no Jews

in the small rural

towns hardly. They

don’t spit or say

we are thieves but

it is as icy in Vermont

as days in Russia.

Lake Champlain is

not like our sea. We

are safe, we are

lonely

If My Grandmother Would Have Written 
a Postcard to Odessa

she would write her

name in salt, salt

and mist, an SOS

from the ship sea

wind slaps with night

water. Somehow I’m

dreaming of Russian

pines. I don’t dream

of the houses on fire,

babies pressed into

a shivering woman’s

chest to keep them

still. Someone had

something to eat the

color of sun going

down behind the

hill late summer,

rose, with its own

sweet skin. They

are everywhere in

America. If the lilies

bloom in our

town of darkness,

just one petal in an

envelope would be

enough

From the First Weeks in New York, If My Grandmother 
Could Have Written a Postcard 

if he had the words, the

language. If he could

spell. If he wasn’t

selling pencils but knew

how to use them, make

the shapes for words

he doesn’t know. If he

was not weighed down

with a pack that made

red marks on his shoulder,

rubbed the skin that

grew pale under layers

of wet wool, he might have

taken the brown wrapping

paper and tried to write

three lines in Russian

to a mother or aunt he

might never see again.

But instead, too tired to

wash hair smelling of

burning leaves he walked

thru, maybe he curled

in  a blue quilt, all he had

of the cottage he left

that night running past

straw roofs on fire,

dreamt of those tall black

pines, but not how, not

yet 17, he will live in

a house he will own,

more grand than any he

saw in his old country

56 North Pleasant Street

past the beads hung over the door,

rose light floods the back room

where the safe is, my grandmother

with a sick baby crying, tapping

the pane under apple leaves

My mother is 8, her new doll’s

head lies smashed on the floor.

She is hating her brother. Spirea

covers the sidewalk. She is

furious at her brother and runs

into the hot stove. Her

grandmother gets a cold knife.

My mother screams, is sure the

knife is a weapon. She is wild

to claw her brother. My great

grandmother will die without

replacing the broken head tho

she promises this until her last

month in the blue bed where I

will try to sleep when my mother

goes to have my sister and won’t

tho my grandmother sings

White Cliffs of Dover and the

apples are like magic green eggs

in July light behind the house

--Lyn Lifshin

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