Bar Dykes

girlsclub jacqueline01302016
From the poem Grit by Jacqueline Elizabeth Letalien

This is how Jacqueline Elizabeth Letalien began one of her four story-poems published in the very first issue of Common Lives/Lesbian Lives: a lesbian femininist quarterly in the Fall of 1981. I met Jacqueline at UMass through SHL a decade earlier than this publication. We both had come out in bars and wound up hanging out and working  together off n on until  1979. After she moved to California she sent me a bound sheaf of poems to add to the Valley history, among them these four which begin to express her Springfield working class experience in ways we had not yet been able to talk about.

With her permission they are reprinted here:

grit p1 jacqueline01302016_0001grit p1 jacqueline01302016grit p2 jacqueline01302016p4 jacqueline01302016

Published by

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.