New York City poet Linda Lerner visited me recently in Somerville to appear on my Somerville Community Access TV show  Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer. Linda has a new poetry collection out from New York Quarterly Books  Takes Guts and Years Sometimes. The front cover is beautifully illustrated by area artists Angela Mark and Michael Shores. Since we are nearly in July I decided to use The Persistence of Memory from her new collection in this week’s LYRICAL.

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The Persistence of Memory
(Title taken from a painting by Salvador Dali)
7/25/’06

July comes round like Dali’s
four melting clocks

I spring out of hot morning showers
to towel dry
apply the lotion he can’t wait to lick off
or I to feel
his scratchy tongue up my legs

Yes it’s like that & this
and even
the little bit I stop him from
triggering every nerve

four years since
you tongued me out of a death
took you
melted down like it was nothing

an alchemist’s lost trick
stumbled on in a bathroom
my cat fooling with
your baby’s bodymind
on a hot July day like the one
four years ago you
vanished
in

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To have your work considered for the Lyrical send it to:
Doug Holder, 25 School St.; Somerville, MA 02143.
dougholder@post.harvard.edu