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Lyn Lifshin |
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HEARING HOWARD STERN say the microphone is like a penis, "it gives power, you know that," he says in an interview and I think of those I've been pulled close to, that electricity, how I panted for the blue eyes behind it, even just touching the dial. How I vowed I'd wrap my legs around that voice, hump his heart. It was those vowels over air waves. It didn't matter that I had seen his eyes, blue, frozen lakes, way before I felt him twist my wrists over my head, each ankle tied to a bed post, that no one, even with a gun, could make me switch the dial or turn him off THE FIRST TIME not in a marriage bed but in a motel I could walk to from that raised ranch my husband and I played house in. Virgins for years after the wedding until I taunted a man with words, the only way I knew, got him to slither in broken shoes from another coast. I didn't know if he really was an ex con. He looked like a stud. He couldn't believe he had me first, rocked back on his knees in the motel as cars honked by. I didn't know if he could kill me, what I'd get from him. Or that I would not feel different, would not feel much. I looked in the mirror, felt his tongue along my mouth. Already I was longing for quiet afternoons alone while this large man who wouldn't fit anywhere slogged a beer, grinned, said he kept tasting me LIKE MASACCIO'S grapes of course, iced rum. Lock the door. We slide out of everything. Listen, I've never taken any pictures like this before you say I want to remember such good skin. Neither of us understands the timer. Whirring. Late already you run your hard fingers down my hip toward that hair. Click and we're shocked, this photograph like nothing we'd imagined, these lovers like Masaccio's leaving that garden THE LOVER I NEVER HAD is the one I thought I wanted. I made him up out of words and short e mails where what was left out was more really than anything he was. When we walked down the street, everyone who drove by noticed, called and honked, saw how lost we were in each other. The lover I never had was truly lost, he must have been hunting for some thing he imagined I had. His arms and eyes wild, dancing as if he was holding me. This lover was not like any other, not like he seemed. Be cause he took in a stray cat, I thought he'd be warm as a lover. He called his cat Mystery and his name was snow but I was too dazzled to see. He liked what he couldn't know. Of course he was icy. The lover I never had was hard as his absence or the frozen lake his eyes were. But the lover I didn't have is more mine than if I had him in poems where I make up what I want to, is more vivid than if he never left |