THE NO MORE APOLOGIZING, THE NO MORE LITTLE LAUGHING BLUES by Lyn Lifshin

apologizing for going to school instead of having a job that made money or babies pretending I took the bus to an office, paper clips in my ear and never that I was reading Wyatt, writing my own dreams in the dust under the bed apologizing for my hair, wild gypsy hair that fell out of every clip the way the life I started dreaming of did. Apologizing for the cats you know, if someone said my skirt was too short, I explained or said sorry, but never that I finally loved my legs I spent years apologizing for not having babies, laughing when someone pulled a Baby Gerber jar out of the closet and held it in front of my eyes like it was some damn cross or a star I should have thrown that thru the glass, I didn’t need to explain the music I liked. One friend said that’s noise. Another said isn’t denim for children? Well I laughed the apologizing oh I don’t want no trouble laugh over the years, pretending to cook, pretending to like babying my husband the only place I said what I meant was in poems. That green was like some huge forbidden flower that grew so big it couldn’t even fit in the house, pulled me out of a window with it toward Colorado I apologized for being what they thought a woman was by being flattered when someone said you write like a man and for not being what they thought a woman, for the cats and leaves instead of booties, for the poems When someone said well, how much do you get paid? you know I pretended, pretended, pretended, I couldn’t stop trying to please the A, the star, the good girl on the forehead. The spanking clean haunted half my life. But the poems had their own life and mine finally followed where the poems were growing, warm paper skin growing finally in my real bed until the room stopped spinning for good the way it used to when I dressed up in suits and hair spray pretending to be all those things I wasn’t: teacher, good girl, lady, wife. I was writing about cocks and hair for years before I’d felt, when I was still making love just on the sheets of paper When the poems first came out, one woman I drove to school with said, I can’t take this. Another said, I don’t know, this can’t be the you I know, so brutal, violent. Which is the real The man I was with moved to the other side of the bed. This was worse than not having babies. His mother said they always knew I was odd my clothes, my hair, the books I brought to bed. They said I never seemed like one of them My own family thought it was OK but couldn’t I write of things that were pleasant? They wanted to know how much I got paid and why I didn’t write for The Atlantic Look, I still have trouble saying no. I want all of you to care about what I’m thinking, maybe even to want my hair It's true, I put a no smoking sign up on the door but twice I have gotten out ashtrays But I have stopped being grateful to be asked to read or to always have some lover right there beside me it's still not easy to get off the phone, tell a young stoned poet it’s a bore to lie with the phone in my ear like a cold rock while he goes on about the evils of money, charging it to my phone But now when I hear myself laughing the apologizing laugh, I know what swallowing those black seeds can do and I spit them out. Like tobacco. (something men could always do) Nothing good grows from the I’m sorry, sorry, only those dark branches and they will get you from inside Lyn Lifshin