Dark Sparkler Read online

  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.r />
  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

  Pit the stars against her seizing heart;

  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.