Dominique Dunne
First, he stood very still in her driveway,
waiting for her to come out.
No. First she stood in the living room
talking the silk off a sultan with her costar.
Then she heard a voice say, Dominique, come outside please. Alone.
But first, the telephone continued its kidnapping of air,
screaming like a car brake teething on a tire wheel.
No. First she screamed with laughter
as the costar made a hat out of a teacup.
Then she couldn’t take the preaching landline anymore,
ripped the receiver off its soapbox.
But first, the costar arrived at her front door smiling,
a box of black licorice and a script under his arm.
No. First she got ready for the costar.
Then she heard something. Or maybe it was just her imagination.
But first, she took her grandfather’s sheath into the shower,
tucked it under the soap.
Washed her hair as quietly as possible with the bathroom door open, listening.
No, first she asked her father to install a dead bolt.
Then relief: that pile of dirty clothes behind her bed
was not a man crouched.
But first she said, I’m sorry, Charles, it’s over between us,
tied together the sheets of their love letters,
climbed out the window of his soul.
No—first—he said—no, warned her—not to do this.
To make him show up at her house,
matchsticks crawling from his mouth,
fingers dripping like horns pulled from the fatal stab.
Sirkka Sari
I pulled a caterpillar off its leaf in the hotel garden
and placed it in my rolling paper with the tobacco.
I could feel it squirm as my tongue ran across the edge, sealing it in.
I smoked it and thought of her.
I found the marrowless leg bone of a lynx.
I held up the white tube toward the sky
and stared at the sun through the hollow.
I did not blink and thought of her.
I collect eyelashes from the used pillows of guests
every time I clean a room.
I boil water and place all of them inside.
I pour their dreams and before I drink,
I blow.
I make a wish and think of her.
Cindy Jenkins
The doctor hands me a piece of chalk,
asks me to draw an outline
illustrating how big I think I am. I draw
a door on the floor and tell him, This is where dad
used to take me for dinner.
Brittany Murphy
Her body dies like a spider’s.
In the shower,
the blooming flower
seeds a cemetery.
A pill lodges in the inner pocket of her flesh coat.
Her breasts were the gifts of ghosts.
Dark tarps of success.
Her mouth dribbles
onto the bathroom floor.
Pollock blood.
The body is lifted from the red carpet,
put in a black bag,
taken to the mother’s screams
for identification.
The Country says good things
about the body.
They print the best photos;
the least bones, the most peach.
Candles are lit in the glint
of every glam. Every magazine stand
does the Southern belle curtsy
in her post-box-office-bomb honor.
The autopsy finds an easy answer.
They say good things about the body.
How bold her eyes were, bigger than Hepburn’s.
The way she could turn in to her camera close-up
like life depended on her.
Bridgette Andersen
A child-star actress is a double-edged dildo.
(Insert a metaphor about getting screwed here.)
No one should have to look back to see
the bright future ahead of them. The future holds
then pushes you away.
I’m gonna tie those pamphlets for cures
around this needle
and wave the white flag.
I just want to lean into the duct tape
this vial is holding up to my mouth.
Cut creativity’s circulation off.
Get some rubber nooses together and gangbang my arm.
Growth has outgrown me.
I’d rather not be a word
associated with weeds and dicks.
I’d rather spend all that future brightness
looking up La Brea’s sparkling skirt at dawn.
Hitchhiking up that boulevard’s famous slit,
catching a ride with some opiates and trading spit.
I’ve heard Junk is starring in Scorsese’s next movie.
This syringe knows people.
Forget my mother and father in all this.
They are a language that died on an ancient tongue.
I’m going to floss my teeth with the pubic hair
of the Hollywood night air,
memorize my lines before I snort them.
I want to know what it feels like
to die in the arms of missing limbs.
To end an act in my own skin,
covered in someone else’s skeleton.
To get on my knees and crawl
on all fours into character.
To fade to black,
then fade through that.
Shannon Michelle Wilsey
A Poem for Bridgette Andersen
by Savannah
They call me Silver Kane
spelled with a k or with a c,
or sometimes it’s just Silver plain,
I don’t care long as they’re calling me.
But I am Savannah mostly to this world and
I gave myself that name after you.
Like your character I’m a runaway girl,
giving in to men who want to protect me too.
I know just how it feels
to want nothing more than to be loved.
What we have in common gives us our appeal—
the fact we never got enough.
They say it looked like a big flower had sprung
in the place where I shot myself dead,
just like those ribbon pigtails clung
onto either side of your head.
Jane Doe
Why do you insist on wearing
that sugarcoat
in the July of your life?
Why don’t you feel more like a riot,
less like the cops?
I want to look you in the shards.
Go down on your cliché
until your taboo kabooms.
What’s the point of sobriety
when you can be the cherry on top,
when you can put confetti in the condom,
pussy pop in clogs,
wrap yourself in Christmas lights.
What’s the point of playing it safe
when you can make a tambourine
out of any two objects.
Wrestle the Ayn Rand impersonator
for her flask,
or better yet,
put the straw directly into the bottle,
avoid the apocalypse altogether?
What’s the point of sweating the details
when I can just purchase the theremin
online?
So let’s drop the socialization charade.
This life’s too short
and the only way to extend it
is with a skirt that’s too short.
A reminder for any man’s hungry eyes
that I shit out of that.
I’m not interested in going out with a bang.
I’m interested in going out
with your father.
I want to teach you how to make origami
from a page by Frank O’Hara.
Fortune Fuck-Hundred.
Let’s get undressed in each other’s mouths.
Skinny dip lips.
I know what you’re thinking and you’re right.
That’s just the revolution talking.
That’s just the Sunday I’m gonna answer
your prayers with.
This is the film
I could finally get cast in.
Heather O’Rourke
INT. HEATHER O’ROURKE’S HOSPITAL ROOM—NIGHT
Facing a window is our heroine, HEATHER O’ROURKE (12). Her sweaty blond hair capsizes over the sanitary pillow. Her closed eyes rest in dark halos on her face. Her hands lie small and creamed like new tulips. O.C. we hear the faint sound of white noise.
CUT TO:
The television, its volume low. O.C. behind the television, a door CLICKS OPEN. We pan to reveal a DARK FIGURE emerging into the room, out of focus. Heather doesn’t move to look.
HEATHER
Is it time? I want to be with Dominique again.
We stay on Heather as O.C. we hear the click of the television being TURNED OFF. The sound of a remote being put down on a table. Heather finally turns her head toward us and slowly opens her eyes, REVEALING WHITE NOISE. She does not blink, blaring light and static sound toward us. We push in on her eyes, the cold frequency getting LOUDER, until we are in a choker, and then inside her, becoming her pupils, becoming the noise, becoming
Heather. Then there is no more
Heather,
just the frantic beads
of tingling pixels covering screen,
bringing us
into the story,
never fading out, never
cutting away.
Abigail Nell
I ate too much bread.
I will never have the knees of Bardot
or the wives of Balanchine.
They must’ve had superior sartoriuses
to be with such a king.
Or is it sartori?
I prefer to think of my legs in Latin. This is a long, slow dance
with self-respect, and I lead with my clubbed foot.
Highfalutin and gluten free.
My stomach looks like uncooked pancake batter.
My upper thigh hangs over my kneecap like an old man’s eyelid.
Imagine a Clydesdale hightailing it through Chinatown snow.
A chandelier covered in calk.
But I’ve crunched the numbers and think I’ve found my six-pack:
I’ll get a new nose. The cartilage lost from one of those
can be measured in grams. If I shave my head,
that’s shaving off one fourth of a pound.
66.6 percent of the three-pound human brain
would be another two pounds down.
The vestigiality of all phalanges is coming to an end.
So why keep them?
And twenty-five feet of intestinal tract?
Let’s half that. Anything gastric’s elastic.
Ribs can be replaced with plastic.
The femur bone is the largest and strongest in the human body.
It would take five times the amount of a person’s weight to break it.
I don’t plan on entering the Baby Elephant Bench Press Olympics.
I’ve already got a big upper lip, so why not
cut off the lower one, get rid of it?
Appendix and coccyx together weigh an infant.
I wonder about a weekly skin grafting treatment?
Skin: Who needs it?
I’ll be the girl they say pink things to,
so weightless she arrives by ghost.
© CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images
Lupe Velez
Cast that bonita bitch pout,
that haughty hound pup strut,
that burned grapefruit breath,
that sexed headdress
poised with turquoise poison.
Cast that loca, better than “wild,”
shimmering brick-style, break through that
turn of the century’s vaudevillian villainess turnstile.
Cast that stare that daze that spell that line
that part that hook that net that look,
that chair through a window
that brow arch, black as hell’s rainbow.
That cha-cha leg language,
no para los gringos.
Cast that hypnotic beat of bone percussion.
Cast doubt.
Exotic leading ladies cast out.
Cast no more post-Barrymore.
That scripted last kiss with Harald Maresch, perished.
Cast that tone-deaf swan song,
that sound of an animal
being chased for its life in the night,
loud as the director yelling cut,
as the casket strapped to the back of the planet
whirling the mantra,
Maria!
Maria!
Maria!
Taruni Sachdev
let the best explosion win,
pull the worst man apart.
Not down for the count.
She’s the punch that knocked the count out.
Loved beyond a reasonable doubt.
She’s a tidal wave from a tiny spout,
a shutter speed on the lens
of an apparition’s eye,
Lil bullied butterfly,
back into her cocoon,
relearning to fly.
Julia Thorp
All thirteen years of him studied her question,
its clunky hooves floundering for traction
in the nascent dewy grooves of his snaking cortex.
(Remember when Artax got stuck in the swamp?
It was like that.)
He pulled out a matchbook, told her he’d give her the time
it took to burn the match gone to give
him three reasons why he should be her boyfriend.
Well, we’re almost the same age.
I love the things you say while playing basketball.
Obviously, I’ve seen all your games.
Our moms are really good friends.
He handed her the coveted Yes,
she smiled, tucked it into her strut.
He watched her walk out of school
and into the front seat of a car
that was not her father’s.
Remember when Artax disappeared into the swamp,
never to be seen by Atreyu again?
It was like that.
© CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images
Sharon Tate
Above me,
the blood thud packs its punches,
suitcases of adrenaline buck her stomach’s structure,
my mother’s.
A squirt of coral floods my cord,
flipping me breached,
the last onion
in a pickle jar.
A bright light passes over her rose wall,
rhubarb-colored vines and marbled sky
then dark again.
A finger pushes in.
A grumbled quake.
Then the thrash of light,
blades like ships crash through her vessels,
a celestial pattern,
the deep peepholes of God,
Little Dipper zippers opening her flesh.
This was how stars were made,
I was just there—
dabbing my pulp on the comets—
and now that thud’s on ice,
and I feel my mother cooling,
me still inside her, forever.
Marilyn Monroe
A fourth fret crept into the neck
of her index finger.
She had wound strands of blond too
tightly.
A corpse corset of a capo.
It stayed like that: a rosy ring of jailed blood
that came to the barred window
and never left.
Lindsay Lohan
Jennifer Davis
Fame is the biological father of Pi.
3.14 we adore. Beyond that
the silence of Ever is what kills.
The never-ending necklace of decimals.
She stumbled across my genetic muck
saying Hey, I’m Alison—do I know you
from somewhere? Are you famous
from something? Yes, I’m from the center of
nowhere, performing Trapeze on a mane.
Tightrope-walking the telephone wires
of washed-up professional wrestlers.
I’m famous for my balance.
I had a cameo in the ninth pew of my father’s funeral.
I starred in both Abandonments—
my mother’s prequel, the sequel for my son.