Linda Lerner is the author of twelve poetry collections, the most recent  Living in Dangerous Times (Pressa Press,2007) & City Woman(2006), March Street Press; (both were Small press Picks); Because You Can’t  I Will, Pudding House,  (2005);  they also published her Greatest Hits, 1989--2002.March Street Press published The Bowery And Other Poems which was a Small Press Review pick of the month. she have been twice nominated for a pushcart prize.   In 1995 Andrew Gettler and she began Poets  on the line, (http://www.echonyc.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology on the Net for which I received two grants for the Nam Vet Poets issue.  The anthology will be kept permanently on line though she stopped publishing it in 2000. Her poems have / will recently appeared in Tribes, Onthebus, The Paterson Literary Review, The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News,  Van Gogh’s Ear, and on line at: Poetz.com, Rogues Scholars Press & Clockwise Cat, &

 New Verse News

just a cat’s breath away

just a cat’s breath away            

..struggling  her way out 
Spanish into English out of Guatemala
to come  where she’s lived for years
Marie keeps it simple....
nothing about the accident that took
her young husband’s life 
left her to raise five kids alone---
it’s ok, she smiles, always smiles
the screen behind which she changes,
lets herself in if I’m out
if I can afford to have her clean
trusting her with the keys
as I would have my own mother
but never did...

my cat, Samsara, I call him sam,
knows her by the smell he picks up
brushing past;  first time
she arrived before I left

he ran after me to the door
fear flashing in his green eyes 
that hurled me back decades:
a Brooklyn tenement stoop I sat on crying
after my mother left my father  
“for good”she screamed
would continue to scream  till 
she watched the words she couldn’t take back
shoveled over his coffin

fear I’d be raised by my old world father
of loosing the one person who keeps a world
from being destroyed
        ...just a cat’s breath away
from what would happen / does

a writer in his mid eighties told me
when the bomb was invented everyone thought
the world would end soon...
forty years later in a hospital room
by his daughter’s side waiting
for a liver to be delivered that
didn’t come in time,
then....it happened then...

drills once sent us rushing under desks for cover
protected us only from fear....and only one kind;

Sam clings to my assurances,
I’ll be back  what
Marie’s husband must have  cried
out the door into the car before it
smashed thru her world

see you soon   love you
last words inhaled whenever someone lights up....
I should scream,  please don’t..
it isn’t only your life
but the smoke that took a life
returns it slowly enters my body 
every part, yes like that  and JUST like that
is snuffed out  and I smell the ashes...
but oh, those few grateful moments

back then / now

it’s that buzz   buzz  of a saw
of bees out of hive
the buzz of cliques----buzzing I heard 

in one of those public prisons of learning  
called Jr hi back then, now middle school
shift shaped unrecognizable but 
I knew when I heard it
felt the sting: church going girls 
wearing hats I made paper copies of 
to show them, a jew who lived
on that Brooklyn tenement block
they ruled, I am not who I am....

the buzzing from across a street
I tried to cross at nine
when a car flung me back...
the buzz of exclusion I take pride in now,
still hurts: “Josephine called me,”  I lied
from my hospital bed,
knowing even then,
it is safer to be on the other side.

a name isn’t a building
what’s inside destroyed with it
what’s on the block 
didn’t vanish  when I left it

when my father fled Russia
he saw swastikas
scrawled in attitudes;
a block is a country a region a workplace...

an Irish poet once told me 
he hated the taste of vodka
drank it only for the buzz,
I didn’t tell him, people have killed to get it...
when his grandfather came here looking for work
he read, “no Irish need apply” on want adds...

sometimes weeks months pass
the silence  feels like a promise
white and creamy goes down so smooth,
then  you hear them 
and the buzzing which never stopped
gets louder...