Untitled
THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS to the wire-bin:
I want to be right on time
Ahead of time, leaning toward fortune:
Never having anticipated being bedbound this long
I can feel sassiness creeping up on me
Like a cloaking angel in an afternoon shadow
A dark raincoat, cigarette on lip
An updo
And jazzhands.
I found a short way after all:
being in the South we told stories.
My stretchers took me from a bed in hell,
past the bone-marrow-transplant kids,
to roaring on tilted wooden wheelchairs
last days, lord those days:
one gin knocked back,
calendared jazzhands
blue denim.
Editor’s note: “Untitled” is a new poem first published in this issue of storySouth. Strongin had this to say about the poem: “This poem contains the overall Drift message of the cycle. I found a short way after all.”
Born in New York City at the end of the thirties, LYNN STRONGIN grew up as a musical child with a psychologist father and freelance artist mother. Following her parents’ divorce in the mid nineteen-forties when this was still not widespread, the second trauma of her childhood was contracting polio at age twelve. However, this allowed her to develop a gift for introspection. After studying musical composition, she went on to take a graduate degree in American literature and poetry at Stanford University. She is now totally devoting her life to poetry. She has written extensively about polio, the war years, and post-war life in her autobiography; INDIGO: An American Jewish Childhood. Her book SPECTRAL FREEDOM was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. She has made British Columbia, Canada, her home for the past thirty years, but still considers herself an American voice. Other subjects important to her are the American South, women’s freedom, and the injustices done to girls and women in such institutions as the Magdalene Laundries. She was recently nominated for the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in British Columbia.
