Monday, November 8, 2010

Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems- My New Chapbook

 
Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other  Love Poems
by Elizabeth P. Glixman
Pudding House Chapbook Series
ISBN 1-58998-932-5
36 pages
Publication November, 2010



About Chapbook

How do I love thee? asked E.B. Browning.

My answer  (to quote 50 Cents) is like a fat boy loves cake.

The poems in Cowboy Writes a  Letter & Other Love Poems are about people who are unfaithful, adoring, contented, reconciled, deluded, infatuated and spiritually transcendent. They are the victims and creators of their confusing and exquisite experiences of love. Emotions that range from cynicism to bliss and back again  appear in their voices. There are husbands and wives who keep secrets, there is the voice of the other woman, the voice of those whose affections are not returned, the voices of parent and child  and there is a woman in love with an actual frog (ribbet, ribbet). New love, old love and all in-between can be found in lyrical, straight  forward and the occasional humorus poem that reveals the power and magnetism of one of the oldest emotions known to man.


Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems is part of the Ohio State University Library Special Collections, SUNY/ Buffalo Lockwood Library Special Collections, Kent State University Library Special Collections, Brown University Library, and Poets House/NYC collection.  Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems is listed in Bowker/Books in Print.


Husbands, Wives and Chocolate
by

Elizabeth P. Glixman
 

I met my husband the dentist at
A free dental clinic downtown.
He loved my poor bite and eroded bicuspids.
In the pre --nuptial I agreed to not eat candy-
To floss brush more
To get that whiter brighter Rembrandt smile.
In sickness and in health
I agreed that all that would
Be sweet in my life would be him.
He slid the ring on my finger
That was clean of the recent M& Ms
I had eaten in the church’s ladies room.
Today it is the week before Easter
I ate six ears of six hollow chocolate bunnies
I hid in the basement near the freezer
And his wall of books on orthodontics.
I can hear him say
There is nothing I love more than straight white teeth.
My husband is a racist.

I am an addict on chocolate heroin
There is nothing I can do about defacing the bunnies.
I am not Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

My husband’s teeth are all crowned.
He is on the city’s campaign
To put fluoride in the city water.
And ban candy bars machines in elementary schools.
If he knew about the bunnies would that be the end?
Would he be Silda Spitzer at my public confession speech
looking at me with ominous eyes?

The polls are out about
A husband, his wife and public humiliation
Concerning chocolate.





Shhh


by



Elizabeth P. Glixman

I smooth silence with my hand
Make it feel like a bed sheet dried in the sun
It is the blessing of relinquishment
After the kettle stops singing
I touch the trail of warmth
Where your hand was on mine
Like the sea and mountains in slow splashing union
I listen to the remnants
Hear the droplets of water fall
The room is white zen silence
I see the morning violet sun
Push stripes of light
Through the plastic blinds
Making a collage across the space 
Where you slept
That is now full of song