Lamp Hospital
(Benazir Bhutto 1953-2007)

Every lamp has a different problem, lined up in the flyer for the boy to take & mend;: a fire-wire for one, a new socket for
the next:lined in the hall they are like patients waiting for surgery, queued up in the Emergency Room;
Dents de lait         every doll when I was small         went in hospital.
Cold harsh as Christian’s soul
sharp as a splinter
sky, blueberry .
Bhutto assassinated:
Suddenly. Flak! First news of the day. Charcoal fires &         lamps go out one after another
London Paris Berlin.         Pakistan.

An ice pan on the river in Prince George seizes up:
Lamp shade clouds roll over assassination
You saw your motheran hour after she died.
Mine I hadn’t seen since last century, last decade, last millenium
         There are no longer angels:         This has thrown us back into the dark ages:
         safekeeping the heart         after assassination one phones home
         wherever that may be now         re-arranges the fire bottles
                 but without ignitionblue red they burn & threaten more burning

Does the bird have built-in template of song?
(Benazir Bhutto 1953-2007)

God moves one hand         the house of love turns to cardboard
the houses on the whole curved row of earth. The woman does not want to continue the marriage Sky a Griselda-mood.
My love’s a cool kid.
I now see that they rooted me on          but I did the running.
In an hour, a fool will be here cackling like a rooster, laughing like a castrato.
The sky has no balls.

They took her out         Pakistan’s prodigal daughter
BB         the woman children point to when called Pakys:
A winter bird who knows cold like his bones
his flight feathers parks on this wintry terrace
cold sharp as splinter, dank as Christian’s heart:
laddering up & down a rose bush finding seeds picking off insects
reflected in the reddish brick glass will he get to the top of thorn-branch before one draws blood, piercing him?

         Why the moonglobe roof?
         What the dare? Recant. The wheelchair took me to college, to New York, which I lived in for half a century, more, the
         boy jumped on to fold steel & x-bar, pancaked in an hour.

Lynn Strongin (b. NYC 1939) grew up in and around New York and in certain parts of the rural South which made a deep impression on her. Parents of Eastern European Jewish ancestors raised her in a rich artistic environment. Her memoir Indigo is based largely on these two locales. Chapters of Indigo have appeared in various venues such as StorySouth, Atlantic /3711, Verb Sap, The Square Table, Riverbabble and in Italy’s Storie. “Audubon Wallpaper,” a chapter which came out first in StorySouth was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She will have twelve books out by mid-2006, among them the anthology The Sorrow Psalms;A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy to be published by the University of Iowa Press, June 2006. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies, seventy journals. In the Sixties, she worked for poet Denise Levertov in the political environment of Berkeley. Most recently her prose has appeared in The Dublin Review. For the past twenty-five years she has made Victoria, British Columbia her home.

Lynn's book of short stories, Spin the Bottle: Kiss Me A Jewish child in the South has been accepted for publication by Plain View Press, Austin.

Email: Lynn Strongin

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