Dark Sparkler Read online

  © CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images

  Dedication

  for my father, the author Russ Tamblyn

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword by Diane di Prima

  Li Tobler

  Untitled Actress

  Thelma Todd

  Miriam Lebelle

  Judith Barsi

  Peg Entwistle

  Jean Harlow

  Martha Anne Dae

  Jayne Mansfield

  Carole Landis

  Anissa Jones

  Susan Peters

  Dominique Dunne

  Sirkka Sari

  Cindy Jenkins

  Brittany Murphy

  Bridgette Andersen

  Shannon Michelle Wilsey

  Jane Doe

  Heather O’Rourke

  Abigail Nell

  Lupe Velez

  Taruni Sachdev

  Julia Thorp

  Sharon Tate

  Marilyn Monroe

  Lindsay Lohan

  Jennifer Davis

  Alison Andres

  Rebecca Shaeffer

  Elizabeth Pine

  Dana Plato

  Samantha Smith

  Lucy Gordon

  Barbara La Marr

  Laurel Gene

  Frances Farmer

  Quentin Dean

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Amber Tamblyn

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Warning: the book you are holding in your hands will break your heart.

  Not a word of Dark Sparkler is “poetic” in the foolish and flowery sense. None of it is symbolic. Amber Tamblyn is not playing with metaphor or some flight of fancy. She is gifting us with the tragedy, the power, and most of all the truth of these women’s lives.

  Dark Sparkler is many things. It is, first of all, wonderful poetry. It is also cartography in that it maps a previously unexplored piece of women’s experience—a part of the map with which Ms. Tamblyn is personally familiar.

  It is also a memorial and a magical act. Because it is all these things, I thought to suggest a way in:

  First, read Dark Sparkler as you would any new poetry book that comes into your hands. Open it at random and read here and there (if that’s your way), or “begin at the beginning” like Alice, go on till you reach the end, then stop. Look at the pictures. Enjoy.

  At some point you will begin to get curious. Something will start to tug at the edge of your mind/heart. At that point, go to the library or search the Internet for information about any girl/woman you find yourself thinking about. Look up Peg Entwistle, Bridgette Andersen, Samantha Smith. Read their (often sadly short) stories. Let your imagination fill in what book and computer don’t say.

  If you get addicted to these poems, as I did, you may find that you begin to print out certain bios and/or pictures—photos, sketches, even daguerreotypes. You will have made your own “companion volume,” one you can turn to when you reread Dark Sparkler. Which you will probably do again and again.

  —Diane di Prima

  Li Tobler

  When you find a skull in the woods,

  do you leave it alone because it disturbs you

  or do you leave it alone

  because of what’s still living

  inside?

  Untitled Actress

  Submission calls for an actress mid-to-late 20s. All ethnicities acceptable. Except Asian-American. Caucasian preferable. Must read teen on-screen. Thin but not gaunt. Lean. Quirky but not unattractive. No brown eyes. Not taller than 5’5”. Weight no more than 109. Actress should have great smile. Straight teeth a must. Must be flexible. Small bust a plus. Can do own stunts. Will waive rights to image, likeness, publicity, and final cut.

  Role calls for nudity. Role calls for simulated sexual intercourse. Role calls for role play with lead male. No stand-in avail. Role pays scale.

  Character is shy yet codependent, searching for love in all the wrong men. Character confides in others at her own risk. Character is fatigued and hollow, suffers from self-doubt, a sense of worthlessness. Character learns the hard way to believe in herself. No brown eyes. Character finally finds happiness when she meets Brad, a successful older businessman, 5’5”.

  Log line: A woman fights to save her soul. Think a young Carole Lombard meets a younger Anna Nicole. Requires an actress that will leave an audience speechless, who’s found her creative voice.

  Not a speaking role.

  Thelma Todd

  This Svedka-sponsored T-Mobile party

  tucked into the tight shoulder blades of the Pacific Palisades

  is honoring the lifetime achievements of Christina Aguilera.

  In the background Debbie Harry croons

  for a terrace of people titillated for the songs

  of incoming messages.

  I’m in some charcoal hallway, cornered

  by an actress in a bandage dress,

  burned one too many times,

  whose cocktail is doing all the healing,

  sloshing on about the good ol’ days,

  back when we were all periodless and vivacious,

  our winning auditions clinging to our underwear.

  How we’d piss victory,

  brush the rejection from our hair.

  She wants to know what I think of Annie—

  how vulgar her success is,

  what a tragedy it’s all become,

  am I also allergic to her over-enunciations?

  She wants to know if I’ve heard

  about the role opposite the handsome future failure,

  am I getting in line

  to lose weight for the seventh-chance director.

  Do I want advice, in general, but more specifically,

  on how to blow up my breasts

  into fame balloons,

  send them up to the helium angels

  on a string body?

  Your career has another five years, maybe, she says, if you’re lucky.

  According to who? I ask.

  According to every actress who’s come before you.

  So I turn my focus to every actress

  coming after me.

  I wade through the crowd with a canister of judgment,

  tag the train of every dress, leave my mark

  on their scars.

  At the bar I run into Nancy,

  drinking away her forties,

  her eyes are flush broken compasses.

  Lost between age fifteen and fifty.

  Fermented blood.

  Deep-sea drinker.

  I do not look into her ocean.

  The fish there float to the bottom.

  I fear I’ll go down there too,

  identifying with the abyss.

  Washed up.

  Banging on the back door of a black hole.

  I plow through the women’s room doors

  into cool tiled silence.

  Run warm water over my shaking hands.

  Above the sink, above the mirror,

  a picture of the bar’s first owner stares down at me,

  that Dust Bowl–era actress

  who killed herself in that Lincoln

  or fell asleep with the engine running.

  Maybe it was a Packard convertible.

  She would’ve had to make her comeback too.

  When the coroner cut her open, he found only

  peas and beans in her stomach. No blue moonstones

  beneath old-fashioned bandages.

  I look down at the sink, the water brimming over

  the tops of my wrists and onto the floor.

  I do not t
ell my fingers what to do.

  My hands are not my hands. They are the water

  surrounded by swirling, singing, overflowing stars.

  Miriam Lebelle

  I’m told Joni Mitchell took my newborn baby feet into her palms,

  called them sweet cashews and kissed their soles.

  I lay there in my father’s arms, a sedated frog,

  a fleshy spit of fresh molecule juice.

  I’m told women have more nerve endings in their hands than men.

  That this is a scientific fact.

  I’m told Galileo wept at how big his hands looked,

  how small they felt,

  while pointing at the stars.

  A book written by every one of God’s representatives tells me

  Salvation is for everyone except God.

  I’m told your poems are about me. All of them.

  Even when they’re about “Jennifer.”

  Even when dedicated to “mother.”

  I was told we met in the nineties. You shook my hand and told me

  I would not remember you saying that I am the love of your life.

  I’m told in thirty-eight years I will lose a child.

  The psychic on Astor Place charges me only ten dollars.

  I’m told we should write more vague prayers for rock stars

  and send them up into the sky on helium balloon strings.

  She was told you kept her letters like Bazooka gum wrappers.

  You broke her cigarette heart like an addict who wanted saving.

  But the only thing you know how to love, I’m told,

  is the sound of cheap plastic high heels on pavement.

  The click-clack of flim-flam.

  I’m told there’s a balcony

  where my old dresses are hung to dry in Detroit.

  I’m told they buried the body with the garter belt still on.

  Judith Barsi

  Plucked:

  All the cat’s whiskers

  girl’s eyebrows

  eyelashes

  cactus thorn

  cored heart

  dialogue from the page

  cattle call

  fish from the feeding tube

  star sticker stuck on the star fucked over

  pool bottom baby tooth

  last exhale

  gasoline receipt under driver’s seat

  bullet pulled from box springs

  mattress grows scorpion legs in aunt’s dreams

  scalp on the stucco

  story line

  arc

  conclusion

  glass animals from the cinder

  initials in sidewalk concrete

  the shadows of initials

  at dawn

  in the cemetery

  Peg Entwistle

  Her Jetticks could always be seen in the dark, even as she climbed into the cold blackened breastbone of the Hollywood Hills. It’s why she loved them so much: Her shoes. Their demand for existence, their inability to disappear. Their worn-in seams had carried her body over the years, over America’s canyons, over various important thresholds. They had been wrenched off by the thumbs of impatient lovers and drenched in the ilk of the Pacific Ocean’s ornaments. They had always known where she was going long before she did.

  Let’s go off the road this time, they whispered up to her.

  Let’s reenact the childhood of Virginia Woolf, collect only the moths attracted to black. Look how sturdy on raw granite we still are? We’ll fight the yellow star thistles and wear them as spurs. We’ll keep the gopher snakes away from your pleats and kick you up the scents of sagebrush and night-blooming jasmine. Tonight, you are endemic to Hollywood.

  She could always count on them. Their faded color could still ruffle up a reflection of the candlelight from the new moon’s dinner parties. Their inch-high heels sowed the Griffith Park ground, a trail of bread crumbs for the seeds of Spanish moss arriving on old wind.

  When you get to the top, Peg, take us off, climb up that letter’s ladder.

  Tell us what you see.

  She put her bare feet on the land.

  It was the spine of an ancient dragon’s carcass, one she’d slain lifetimes ago.

  She climbed the white H in the HOLLYWOODLAND sign,

  occasionally looking down at the black clouds of chaparral floating on the earth.

  We can see up your dress! her Jetticks teased. Nice hosiery, ma cherie!

  Shhhhh! she teased back. Everyone knows all the coyotes are drag queens in Los Angeles! They will come and try to wear you if you’re not quiet!

  The wind began to move in an unfamiliar way.

  Her senses shifted like water striders over ripples.

  The ground felt incidental.

  For the first time, she shifted her gaze down

  at her bare feet, naked and crooked.

  Wild and full of sudden language.

  She knew they had carried all the secrets of her shoes.

  What did they know?

  She wanted to know

  what it’d be like to get seen in the dark.

  To make the first move.

  She looked up and out and jumped

  into the stars, into the famous

  valley of light.

  Jean Harlow

  In black and white

  the shadows of her eyelashes

  like famous film nuns falling on ivory saints

  black and white

  her illnesses were not

  black and white

  kidneys couldn’t even agree on a shade

  black and white

  she was so pale

  someone needed to balance her out

  with black

  And white? The chipped tooth of a czar

  a scar on the sun

  look how she squints

  her lover blinds her

  something black and white

  she smiles like the opening of a piano lid

  with no black and whites

  she rolled the dice of a career and saw no

  numbers just black and white

  what a depression-era star knows is

  no blacks just whites

  with a mole so black

  and hair so white

  she told the doctor she feared the dark

  that it felt like she was looking into the light

  there there they all told her

  and made her sign away her

  black on the white

  And the beginning of Technicolor

  meant the end of

  but blood dried on the hospital sheets

  will always be

  Martha Anne Dae

  And I remember you chasing butterflies with a pasta strainer,

  screaming, Drop your antennae! Put up your weapons!

  Your face an arsonist’s painting,

  your cheeks freckled in the ash of pubescent rage.

  You caught them, crushed their bodies with your fragile fingers

  until it was your limbs that were winged,

  your hands covered in mashed melanin pigments.

  See? you said.

  They aren’t the only ones who can fly.

  And I remember your stems, flying softly in no particular wind,

  dusted in a young violence,

  the strainer forgotten

  as your body reached like a bow toward the sky,

  and every last arrowhead was unearthed from your eyes.

  How your arms carried you into silence

  like a single creature falling

  lifeless from a migration.

  Jayne Mansfield

  Your neck was a study of the asterisk,

  the silken shape of Sanskrit,

  the sucker punch of succulents.

  Your neck a thinning glacier,

  fine as the grind of a blade curve,

  soft as a k in a known word

  long as they say about slow burns.

  Your neck the plac
e where pearls retired

  below the face your girls admired.

  Your neck was a fortune you did not spend.

  Your neck is what they’ll remember the most.

  Your neck in the end.

  Carole Landis

  My heart’s always been in the right place:

  On all that’s steel in a Fairfield February

  Climbing up the fingers of the sun to sleep in the deep slits of its wrists

  Hula hooping my way into a new era’s horse operas

  Watching a pier burn into the blue bier of Santa Monica Bay

  In the roots of a Polish farm girl’s hair.

  My heart will always be in the right place:

  In the caught talk of history’s hingeless jaw

  You say Seducing Seconal

  I say Seconal the Seducer

  At the front line of my ending,

  At the bottom of the mountain,

  looking down.

  Anissa Jones

  My heart’s always been in the right place:

  In the worn levees of West Lafayette

  Floating with the crocodile behind its hunter

  In a jar of dead fireflies my brother left under the sun.

  My heart will always be in the right place:

  In the caught talk of history’s hingeless jaw

  You say Seducing Seconal

  I say Seconal the Seducer

  At the front line of my ending,

  At the bottom of the mountain,

  looking down.

  Susan Peters

  My hands in your hair. My fingers down your chest. My feet in the warm summer mud. My hips opening to a stand. You drinking the coral from my elbows. Your hands casting spells under my dress. Your fingers the magic wands. Your hips folding around my body like a famous novel’s sleeve. The taste of gin. Of salt, of mustard. Warm celery left out on the picnic blanket, the taste of grapes, swallowing wine, swallowing fog, swallowing you. The feel of bare ankles. Willow brushing across my knees through a field. A silk hem. Stockings. Your kisses rising like an elevator up my legs, each muscle a floor with an appointment you’ve arrived early for. You take your time. Taker of time. Your feet rubbing against mine under our sheets. Our sheets. My feet standing on top of my father’s when I was a child. This is how I learned to dance. You wanting to waltz outside the Mayfair. You loving my glide. You rubbing the skin of a peach on my Achilles. You licking the bleak roe out from under my fingernails. My nipples explode in your mouth like small brown cannons. The taste of meat. Of game. Of duck. Even after what happened, of duck. Strawberries. Lime. Pickled okra, soft butter, soft-boiled eggs in the morning, the smell of your strong coffee and undercooked bacon. The smell of your cologne in the other room. The feel of a blade through onion, blade through fat, through fennel root, carrot, ginger, pecan pie. Blade in the jam, blackberry on rye, sour cherry and sweet cheese on buckwheat. You feeding me basil and sorrel from our garden. Our garden. Champagne from our successes. Our successes. Fresh mint paste from France for our toothbrushes. Our toothbrushes. My hands, dressing you, back before you had to lean down so I could straighten your tie. Button your collar. Lick a hair back into line with those other silver soldiers. Kiss you good-bye, my hands in your hair, fingers down your chest. You pulling me in. My lower back like your gloves. Your favorite gloves by the front door where we kept the mail in our house. Our house. Our house. Our house. Our home. Our. The taste of orange. Of stomach acid. Iron. My tongue dark and thin as a stewed bay leaf. The taste of bittersweet. Of ash. Of my own medicine. Of resignation. Waterlessness. My hands in my own hair, my fingers on my chest. You gone. My body, cold winter mud getting colder.