DOWNLOAD PDF Here
Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2026
Family silvers, poems by Lynn Strongin.
Family silvers
Roll over your portrait, quicksilver. Flee!
Fruit parlors gleam in Japan. Parlez, talking tragedy. My words are the only shawl
sheltering me
a
cri de Coeur, one step near oblivion.
With a disfigured face, like Cherie, with a strawberry birthmark:
Toughen up, the sadness of parlors lit dimly: frugally.
Landscape a great weight on the eyeball, a passport to God could be.
Being cut by glass the Private, not knowing it till he sees blood run down his leg.
My summer a woody rust-belted keg for shampoos.
Is open to the sky
The snowy owl, red fox are native to this country
We’re as strange as the silver running over your portrait solarized like bruised silver quietness, brown eyes.
FIRST, THE sadness of turning thirteen
The movie parlor
Marquee bulbs blinded by noon
With a girlfriend chewing gum: the motes of dust whirl from projector
to milky screen
Then the ice cream parlor, frilly socks with bleached sandals
Of a Sunday, a mood-board downtown
Small town fuzzy in the background. Glossies, movie mags, the north star.
Two years ago
She was wheeled on a stretcher in pad & gown
to high-ceilinged hospital auditorium to see Gene Autrey. Dale Evans riding
into sunset.
The beauty as it existed at the edge of town, the summer before polio
everything was on loan, bent, cardboard, corrugated roofs of iron.
AMID THE SILENCE of silvers
Flocked birds
Passenger pigeons who brought love letters.
She rested in the sitting room, front parlor:
radio featured someone partnering with a double bassist. Last stop,
the train stains wood platform.
She kept the latest letter folded to her breast-
pocket.
It warmed
The color of magnolia at the edges.
And it wasn’t spring, on the boulevard, families silvering.
You only get one chance to get the sparkles right. Rise up. Dance on!
© Lynn Strongin
Lynn Strongin, b NYC 1939 grew up in a household of music and the arts. Attended Manhattan School of Music, transferred to Hunter College for a B.A., went to Stanford University for an M.A. in Literature. Moved to Berkely during the active sixties, worked as secretary for Denise Levertov, met Josephine Miles and other Bay Area poets. Began to publish in small magazines. Has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, published fourteen books, won an NEA creative writing award and appeared in twenty groundbreaking anthologies, mainly feminist. A pioneer for rights for the disabled and for women, Strongin now lives in Canada which has become her second home. Lynn was also nominated for Lifetime achievement for the Woodcock Award (Canada). Her latest book, “Salai, you little Devil! The Shipwreck of Adoration”, which is on Leonardo da Vinci’s lifetime, “Apprentice / companion/ lover” out on Amazon.
