LB Thompson studied poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her chapbook, Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money (2003) won the Center For Book Arts prize. Her poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and Stonecutter as well as other literary magazines and websites. She teaches writing at The New School and at Suffolk County Community College. She recently completed a poetry manuscript entitled The Dark Skirt of the Universe, and is at work on a novel and a collection of essays.
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The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003)From"Facing Up"
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003):- Print Books
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Fence (Spring/Summer 2001)From"Interlocking Shapes"
The seven astronomers lay on their backs,
upside-down skydivers.
The universe, said Galileo,
is made of interlocking shapes
written in a language of mathematics.
But how did it begin? someone asked.
Your father's erection greeted your mother
through the window
of his underpants.
And then what happened?
A release of hormones; secretion
from neurons in the brain:
"I love you."
"I think I love you."
Fence (Spring/Summer 2001):- Print Books
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Stonecutter Issue 3 (2012)From"Ode to the Host: Pumpwood Tree"
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
my story began. I’ve been laurel,
olive, fig and fir; I return again to play the role
of hospitable tree. I’m twenty years elderly,
yes, geriatric for a Pumpwood, a Cecropia –
these names they call me, they who listen
who know such bedecked and decorated
choirs in the cathedral of one rainforest tree.
I’ve fallen in finales. It’s a specialty,
but I fear the final scene: wind not a murmur but a crack.
Stonecutter Issue 3:- Print Books
Selected Works
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“This is poetry that could only be poetry — it has real wit as well as sensuousness. Ms. Thompson is a true visionary poet. So wild and strange and brilliant, this poetry is alive — filled with the sense of a part-human, part-Other intelligence, curious, questing. Also astonishing is the bright, clear gaze — like being in the presence of the oracle.”