PoetryMagazine.com

Linda Lerner

USA

Linda Lerner  was born and educated in New York City; Her most recent collection, Takes Guts & Years Sometimes, was just  published by New York Quarterly Books  June, 2011. http://www.nyqbooks.org/title/takesgutsandyearssometimes
She’s previously published thirteen collections of poetry. The  most recent:  Something Is Burning In Brooklyn (2009, Iniquity Press/ Vendetta Books) Living In Dangerous Times (Presa Press, 2007)  and City Woman (March Street Press, Fall, 2006, both  Small Press Reviews’ Picks). Two previous collections also had that honor; she’s been nominated twice for a pushcart prize. In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets on the Line, (http://www.echony.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology on the Net for which she received two grants. 
She’s published in the New York Quarterly, Onthebus, Louisiana Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragged Lion Anthology, Chiron Revie, Danse Mcabre, Tribes, Van Gogh’s Ear, Home Planet NewsNew Verse News, Rusty Truck, et.al. 
She has read widely across the United States

 

 

 

Young Man With A Guitar
    Tuscalousa Alabama 4/29/2011

a young man with a guitar on his back
stares out on piles of rubble...
 
like photos ripped to shreds, newsprint  scatters
this scene across five states pursuing tornadoes
 
those who survived fled before
the photographer could capture them
who this man will bring  back in song
strum guitar strings to resuscitate
those  doctors couldn’t, rebuild lives
 
I know this as I know how someone
can be brought back to life line by line in poems
as I know what he must have sacrificed
to have saved his guitar for this purpose
 
a man who’ll never be able to explain
to some woman how he knows
what birth pangs feels like
convince her there’s no one else,
 
this woman he’ll meet far from here
who’ll sense others breathing down her neck
as he presses close, the smell of
blood clotted earth  dust swirling  around them

 

 

 

 

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