Dark Sparkler Read online

  I’ve been in the background my entire life.

  Take it from an actress who never wanted to be one, Alison:

  What I’ve been in and what you’ve been in

  ain’t nothin’ compared to what we’ll be in someday.

  A fistfight with Heaven’s entry fees.

  A wolf prison when the moon finally throws us its bone.

  A mediocre exchange of oxygenated vowels

  with the landlords of our wrinkled tits.

  Casting our sails into a body of acceptance

  speeches with the lowest of tides.

  Do you think you’ll find me famous

  when I tell you I’m broke?

  When I tell you this drink is what keeps me going?

  When I can’t remember either what I was famous for.

  Will I still be famous tomorrow when you wake up

  and say to your roommate,

  I have discovered the final digit of Pi.

  It’s that drunk bitch in the Thirty-second Street bar.

  Alison Andres

  I couldn’t remember her name, only that we are both specieless.

  I recall some coded interview quote from the nineties

  wearing too many auras, but even then she was impossible to read,

  drowning in the glossy undercurrents of a magazine.

  In person, she is a resistance of instances.

  A rogue bud tastelessly wasting my tongue.

  But her eyes.

  Those hippodromes of grief.

  I recognize their unsymmetrical trickle as my own,

  her face an apron her mother left stains on.

  Those slouched ducts, animated oilcans,

  the parted beaks of birds bracing for lighting in trees.

  Eyelashes long and straight as grass

  on a dead man’s lawn.

  There is no such throne she said

  when I asked if she was famous.

  I sieved through the archives of her breath.

  I wanted to say:

  Hey. I understand. I am an actress too.

  Tell her about the auditions and head shots,

  rejection after long years of rejections,

  notes about the lip I give,

  surgical encouragements.

  I wanted to attach my tipsy limbs to her umbilical,

  reach in and untie all the knots,

  turn them into safety nets for blood.

  Instead, I walked away from the crash,

  an upward-turned shield projecting

  wrinkles onto my face.

  My friends waited to hear what I’d uncovered.

  I said nothing.

  Ordered a hard drink, something darker, something I could see

  my own reflection in.

  Rebecca Shaeffer

  I turned up the volume on the TV,

  let the laugh track eat the eggs

  out of me. She set free

  a thousand little boys

  under my breath.

  A rebirth. Of sorts.

  My finger on the remote,

  her hair my new midnight.

  I could not obey curfews.

  I would be her leading man.

  She was my actress.

  Off-screen I’d imagine

  inviting her through the glass curtain,

  letting her taste my knees.

  I watched her grow up,

  angels getting tangled in her fast ankles,

  the slope of her earlobe must taste

  of honeysuckled iron.

  My beard tastes of fireplace-smoked fish.

  I am watching myself grow old.

  Cracking knees.

  Through the glass curtain,

  she is never on-screen anymore.

  No actress.

  Just leading men.

  Her hair is becoming someone else’s midnight.

  New curfews.

  New thumbs.

  I wanted to cage a thousand boys

  under her breath

  in our final moments.

  Make them a death. Of sorts.

  Make a death of her.

  But when I turn up the volume on the TV

  no laugh track is playing.

  Elizabeth Pine

  I wake to the throbbing

  sounds of Ibiza on the television.

  I see beautiful bikinis eating bananas.

  In bikinis eating the asses

  of other beautiful bikinis.

  A girlie grind of tanned tibias.

  Bronzed bombs ticking

  twenty-four-karat beach backdrops.

  Seems like everyone’s having paradise for lunch but me.

  I am no glowing globe of shaken gold.

  No leggy Cindy. Kardashian’t.

  I am the crutch apparatus of an amputee.

  The falsest identity. The girl next door

  to the girl next door.

  I’d like to dice up my eyes,

  form a search party.

  We interrupt this program for breaking news:

  Has anyone seen this nobody?

  Dana Plato

  My son spends all day polishing his weapon

  before he pours the liquor in

  and shoots himself in the mouth.

  When his head is gone

  the sky rains his remains for days.

  His body stumbles around trying to steady itself.

  His arms hold him upright, his hands

  search for shelter.

  Blasted, he’ll dance on a dime

  for strangers with quarters,

  or mime a moment from Macbeth’s death for paper.

  When it stops raining,

  I walk around and clean up his mess.

  His blood on the bar,

  the cement covered in meat.

  His clothes, red ghosts,

  his lungs hang from the trees.

  At night I return to the home

  we built from umbrellas.

  I assemble his weapons, drink by drink.

  Before I sleep,

  I make a list of tomorrow’s chores.

  In the mirror I see only the time-

  lapsed weather patterns of 1964.

  Samantha Smith

  Out of the blue,

  you rise like a bird shooting

  through the Atlantic’s attic.

  What lifts you from the ocean cannot be seen.

  It cannot be explained.

  The plane crashed and now the splash grabs

  up

  for your feet to keep you in the deep

  but you are free.

  Your spine propels into daylight,

  charging the tusks of clouds.

  You are a gunpowder pilgrim.

  You are no longer a child,

  your voice no longer stuck

  in the crashed black box that sunk in your gut,

  no longer the flicker of someone else’s desire,

  higher now.

  Up

  Up

  Now you owe the world nothing,

  your heart catches up to your body and bleeds into sprint.

  Up

  Up

  Now your mind obeys its outlaw,

  all the broken clock hands want your time.

  Not even the air can breathe

  near your speed.

  Up

  Up

  Now you’re fourteen:

  You love photographs,

  particularly astrophotography,

  something about the way the Hubble Telescope

  can grasp the nth shades of red.

  Seventeen:

  You roll around in a bed of gardenia

  with a boy named Henry who tells you

  this is how they make perfume in Florence.

  Twenty-one:

  You see your first Broadway play

  starring Vanessa Redgrave.

  Her eyes are so familiar.

  Twenty-five:

  You beg your mother
not to do anything to her face.

  You tell her she’s perfect.

  You believe in her killer beauty

  like Russians believe in ricin.

  Twenty-nine:

  You have so many questions to sow.

  You cut off all your hair with kitchen scissors,

  throw your favorite high heels

  into the East River.

  Thirty-two:

  You study planets, Saturn’s return.

  Become obsessed with centrifugal force,

  all known galaxies, physics,

  the unknown heavens and hells.

  Everything you cannot control.

  Up

  Up

  Thirty-four:

  You try on your first pressurized suit

  during your astronautics exam.

  You are in love.

  You meet a man

  who also defies gravity.

  Thirty-five:

  She is born with your mother’s eyes.

  Thirty-seven:

  Your mother dies.

  Forty-two:

  On your first mission into space,

  you recall your mother’s umbilical cord

  being cut from you.

  Your high heels floating down the river,

  all the way into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Fifty-two:

  Your daughter begs you not to do anything to your face.

  You are perfect.

  Up

  Up

  Higher now

  Fifty-eight:

  Sixty-three:

  Sixty-five:

  You take up guitar lessons before your last interstellar flight.

  You write the only song you’ll ever write.

  About an actress’s eyes.

  How bold they were.

  Bigger than Hepburn’s.

  Sixty-eight:

  Your daughter has so many questions to sow.

  Your answers are in full bloom.

  Seventy-five:

  No longer a child—

  Eighty-one:

  not even the air can breathe—

  Ninety-three:

  The Earth grabs

  up

  up

  up

  up

  up

  for your feet—

  but what lifts you from this world

  cannot be seen

  you are free

  you are free

  you are free

  Lucy Gordon

  In the paraphrased haze of hash I ask about Lucy.

  Not what was written in the Guardian

  but what you’ve been guarding.

  We are so high, the moon is in your mouth, it’s hard to articulate

  your mourning. Grief tugs in all directions on each tooth.

  Your knees touch like the foreheads of sole surviving siblings.

  The Lucy the Guardian knew

  was from London, was beautiful and talented.

  Born 1980.

  The Lucy I knew, you begin,

  Carried all her secrets in her hands.

  They were so quiet.

  She went to Oxford and spoke French fluently. Her parents were middle-class academics. One of her parents was a shrink. She moved to New York to pursue modeling, liked to smoke cigarettes at Lucky Strike. She was chased by creatures and men adored her.

  Once, she paid for her parents to stay at the Soho Grand when they came to visit. They were embarrassed she paid. She was embarrassed they were embarrassed.

  A cab came whizzing by with her face on it. Her parents were thrilled. She cried.

  They eventually got divorced. Her mother got cancer. Lucy threw herself into work to outrun the guilt of not being there. She segued into acting, a kind of bladed snake that slithered into existing wounds. She was excited and anxious for her first big film. She went to its premiere, where the director told her she had been cut out of the film.

  She sat and watched, smiling.

  Some of her eating issues came back. Lucy got a shrink. Was treated for depression. My buddy Neil swears she started talking about herself in the third person around this time. There was a fresh desperation. She would fall instantly in love

  with anyone she met on a plane. She was so English about not showing what was going on inside.

  She moved to Los Angeles to pursue more work when we met. Our lives were going nowhere. I had PTSD. She was lost. We would drive around listening to Otis Redding box sets and eat pie and drink coffee in the middle of the night at diners.

  She loved rosé and shellfish and the sound of rain on windows.

  She was very comfortable to lay my head on in her new apartment.

  She had two veins that formed a V in the middle of her forehead whenever she laughed or sighed.

  Something amazing could be happening between us

  she said.

  I shut down inside

  shut her down outside

  We didn’t talk for a while.

  Lucy moved to France and met a cinematographer whom she quickly moved in with. Lost. She became close with his family and his daughter, especially his mother. Lucy loved the way she held pens. Her quiet hands. Her green glass vases, spread around the house, holding nothing.

  She was cast as Jane Birkin in the Serge Gainsbourg biopic.

  The mother became ill.

  Months later, Lucy went to Cannes with her costar to promote their film.

  Something happened

  Lost

  Outrun the guilt

  With a smile on her face

  She came home from Cannes to help her boyfriend bury his mother. The death was quick.

  A friend in England committed suicide.

  Her mother was still ill back in England.

  The guilt.

  I rang her in Paris to check in.

  It was a Monday.

  She needed to call me back.

  Was from London

  Beautiful and talented

  Born 1980

  –2009.

  The cinematographer found her and screamed for the police. In his desperation to revive her with CPR, he broke three of her ribs. This is how he knew for sure she was dead.

  “Acting is what she always wanted to do. It’s a tragedy that it’s been cut off so soon.”

  “Lucy brought light. She was bright in every moment of her life.”

  “ ,” they said.

  “ ,” she was quoted as saying.

  “ ,” the statement from the family read.

  I helped Lucy’s sister clean out her apartment in the East Village three weeks later.

  Lucy Gordon left her estate to friends, family, and her sister.

  She wore Lucy’s clothes the entire time we packed.

  Her quiet hands, filling up boxes,

  inviting all the silence to finally leave the room.

  Barbara La Marr

  (323) 469-9933

  Laurel Gene

  Shave the sheets of my songless success,

  expose the rotted age of me now—

  my toothless breasts, my hips like a cracked cow skull

  hanging crooked on the butcher’s wall.

  Remember what I once was.

  The laurels of the Gene name.

  My boom impact on the Baby Generation.

  My prepubescent niche pizzazz.

  Remember how the phone threw offers for

  Little Jenny Sues into my father’s ear. He’d

  suck the bucks out of the cord,

  a straw into a spectrogram.

  I was his dark sparkler. A tarantula on fire.

  An innocent with apple juice eyes and a

  brain full of famished birds.

  I used to play characters. Now I’m portrayed.

  As a thirty-year-old eighty-year-old domestic darling.

  My husband’s office phone plays mum. The only offers are

  from the sink’s silverfish to kill them.

  When I vacuum I think of Ingmar B
ergman

  fucking me from behind. I open

  like the palms of Julius Caesar to a crowd.

  Men used to rearrange their months to fit my seasons.

  I suck a finger then the cauldron in his tip.

  He films my apron sticking to the sweat.

  Makes this bad heart a pulse from the sky.

  I am a distant explosion of myself again. A star. Remember

  being a star.

  This is how to die in the arms of a suburban wind,

  learning how to be forgotten

  over and over again.

  Frances Farmer

  1.

  The doctors spent ten years working on flower arrangements

  in the boned vase that held up her brain.

  When she came out, you could see through her skin to the frozen pipes.

  Her fingernails were green boats beached into their mossed beds.

  At the movie premiere, she dragged a leg behind her.

  Walked on the side of her ankle in front of the photographers.

  Frances! they’d clamor,

  Tell your fans how you keep such a trim figure!

  Her eyes cooked like the fresh campfires

  of convicts on the run.

  Everyone loved her new hairstyle—

  two oiled fish skins parted down the middle.

  Frances!

  Tell us what you’ve been up to all these years!

  What was it like to work with Tyrone Power?

  Frances opened her mouth to answer

  A bug crawled out, fell to the ground

  and burrowed right back into a hole in her foot.

  The paparazzi followed her every move,

  taking shots of liquid

  she’d leave behind.

  They loved the beads

  of blood she wore down her neck.

  The yellow diamonds

  crusted in her eyes.

  The tie-dye trend of

  immortal death. To die forever.

  After an embrace, her lover found himself

  leaning down

  to pick up all her bones off the ground.

  2.

  Mr. Harvester came home one evening and found a trail

  of withered deer thighs on his front lawn.

  Mrs. Pellington found muddy footprints leading up her front porch

  and only muddy handprints leading away from it.

  An old roommate of Christine swore she saw someone

  climb a telephone pole one night to eat pigeon eggs from their nests.

  Rumor had it someone had been stealing chicken hearts

  from the Branson Family Butchery.

  The Weintraubs in 4B went missing, completely.