Lynne Bronstein

Lynne Bronstein is the author of five poetry collections, Astray from Normalcy, Roughage, Thirsty in the Ocean, Border Crossings, and Nasty Girls. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and other media, including Playgirl, Beyond Baroque Obras, California State Poetry Quarterly, VolNo, Electrum, Poetry Superhighway, poeticdiversity, Silver Birch Press, Chiron Review, Galway Review, Lummox, Spectrum, Voices from Leimert Park, The Art of Being Human, Revolutionary Poets Brigade, Free Venice Beachhead, Caffeine, OnTarget, Subtletea, The Stone Bird, Al-Khemia, the Sisters in Crime anthology LAst Resort, and National Public Radio. In addition, she has been a journalist for five decades, writing for the Los Angeles Times and other Los Angeles area newspapers. She adapted Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a contemporary Valley-speak spoof which was performed at the Studio City and Hollywood public libraries. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and for four Best of the Net Awards for poetry and short fiction. She won a prize for her short story “Why Me” and two prizes from Channel 37 public access for news writing. She has taught poetry and journalism workshops for children at 826LA and for the Arcadia Library and was cited by the city and county of Los Angeles for her mentoring work with Jewish Vocational Service. A native New Yorker and LA transplant, she lives in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley and has three cats.

Nasty Girls, (Four Feathers Publishing) is a collection of poems about women throughout history who defied the sexual standards of their times by doing what they felt like doing, whether it was enjoying sex with many lovers or speaking their minds. It is currently available only in e-book format.

How to Buy Nasty Girls: Please send an email to tanysare@earthlink.net with your email address. I will send you a pdf of the book. The cost is $4.00 or whatever you might like to donate. Payment can be made through PayPal at PayPal.me/LynneBronstein.


Josephine Marcus

Where was during I the gunfight
At the OK Corral?
Waiting for my man, of course.
But from what I heard about the fight
I should have been there.
I could have stopped them cold
Simply by showing up
Wearing only that black veil
I wore for my French postcard photo.
They would have stared at
My perfectly formed breasts
And their guns would have gone limp
While all their blood rushed elsewhere.
Then I could have fired my own inner forces
And shot the bad guys down.

Historians have mixed me up
With the nighttime ladies of Tombstone.
They always called us whores
If we came and went
And lived our lives
As if we shot straight from the hip
And in fact, we sometimes had to do just that.
I drank up barroom brawls
And walked down the scruffy streets
With my head held high.
The Sheriff’s lady,
Then the gunfighter’s bride.
Yes, I posed for that picture card
But it was a matter of my own pride.

Society demanded I pay the price
By feigning shame for my former life.
Doc Holliday once asked Wyatt
If he had become a Jew because of me.
No, his religion, to the end
Was dreaming of his wilder days
As he meandered on movie sets for silent westerns.
I, on the other hand, became devout.
Lit Shabbas candles and recited the prayers,
Polished the shine on my husband’s guns,
Insisted the books and movies
Convey a purer image.
He became the Savior of the West
And I wrote myself out of the story.

When I ran away so young, I thought
My family must be sitting shiva for me.
Now I sit shiva for myself
For one hell of an eternity.
But I relished being the dark Judean lady
With the sheer veil falling over the naked me.
I did not care if my family mourned
So long as I lived, rough, free, and easy.