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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.
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
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.