Lynne Jensen Lampe writes poetry about family, mental illness, and societal expectations. Following and breaking rules. Stigma. Soon after Lynne was born, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and what was then called manic-depression and sent from the air base in Newfoundland to a hospital in Florida, the first of many such separations.
Lynne’s poems appear in Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, One, Yemassee, Many Nice Donkeys, The Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Small Orange, LIT Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), was a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and a finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award. A Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist, she edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
When not writing, Lynne edits academic books, research journals, and YA novels. She lives in mid-Missouri with her musician husband, two dogs, and a friendly number of dust bunnies.
“She sounds many notes …
writing about family history, the American landscape and more elemental realities such as desire and mercy.”
—Aarik Danielsen, Columbia Daily Tribune
No Sleep Is Safe in a Cold Bed
Missing him daggers my sleep
this sticky Missouri night.
A dream slurry claims me,
feeds me bayou, angry lover, young
doe limp and dying. A steep bridge,
the word aliquot, an old Fairlane
with its windows down, me
at the wheel, metal-cold. Empty
until he slides into our red bed
and his thighs wrap mine. I release
my carapace of worry to his heat.
The murk seeps into gardens
of hosta and coral bell, pokeweed,
sumac, black raspberry. Night warms
itself with our bodies, their tangle
of light waiting to rebuke the moon.
from Rough-Cut Elegies:
An Anthology of Missouri Poets
Spartan Press, 2024
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