All the children knew better.
Something was strange
about the fleshed thing
that lived at the end of their street.
One of the children,
a young boy named Bruce,
called her Francestein.
Francestein.
3.
Bruce and his mother sat in the living room
watching an episode of This Is Your Life.
The guest, Frances Farmer, listened to the voice of a surprise guest
who would reveal himself as an old friend.
The old friend ran out onto the stage
and threw his arms around Frances.
The audience applauded.
Frances mirrored the man,
doing as he did,
moving her arms
in his way,
feeling as he felt.
Bruce watched her nose
sniff at the side of the friend’s head,
her tongue like a worm, searching
for a way in.
Quentin Dean
Was last seen in the last scene
of “A Person Unknown.”
Could be overheard offering lasso lessons
to the mortician on his day off.
Kept a box of black widow spiders as pets.
Fed them fresh aphids from the bellies of calla lilies.
Once poured a bottle of Campari in the kiddie pool,
dared Patrick to dive.
Broke my brother’s heart
like the shell of an egg between meals.
Never spoke of it again.
Insisted we make the soup from scratch.
Told us if we wanted to fly in our dreams
we must eat cayenne pepper before bed.
Had a doppelgänger in Nebraska
who sketched missing horses for a living.
Took too many mushrooms one summer, spent an afternoon reading
Scripture and Meisner leaning over
an ice tray in the freezer.
Sent a care package of bologna packed with frozen books.
Sent all the historians thank-you notes on stationery
bearing their mothers’ names.
Sent her biographer to a mental institution.
Kissed me in a neon alley in fake Paris.
In between Russian roulette’s bullets.
All up against the fortune-teller’s window.
Walked the walk.
Talked the dirty talk.
Tongue-tied the sword swallower,
made a cherry stem out of him.
Never tied the knot.
Had four children.
Was survived by three children.
Went by the name Andrea.
Was also known as Palmer.
Will be remembered as Dolores.
A.k.a. Corky.
Gave me the nickname Blue Kid.
Is still alive.
Never lived.
Epilogue
© CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images
True or False:
The actress
The batshit catalyst
The spoiled brat
The narcissist
Mommy’s child
Bonnie’s employer
The indecisive twentysomething
The ambitious auditioner
The adult ingenue
The space case
The one who is always late
The flake
The girlfriend you can’t count on
The girlfriend you can take advantage of
The self-absorbed whiner
The gutless tearjerker
The stunted mirror lurker
The same ol’ same ol’
The one who got away
The one who is going away
The fiery liar
The uninspired for hire
The networker extraordinaire
The soul-broke millionaire
The horror movie captivator
The serial masturbator
The serial cereal eater
The best fucking kisser
The second best fuck since Tinder
The temper igniter
The nameless woman
Amber Tamblyn
The abortionist
The fortuneless extortionist
The breadwinner
The dead ringer
Fake Emma Stone
The poet
The author
died during the writing of this book.
Facts about Brittany Murphy for Poem journal entry June 22, 2010
• She died in the shower.
• Her film Uptown Girls grossed $44,617,342.
• Her film Abandoned was released posthumously, straight to DVD.
• My old agent told me no one was allowed to call her house before 10:00 A.M.
• She was 5' 2" tall.
• She was diagnosed with a heart murmur as a child.
• She was dropped from the film Happy Feet due to rumored drug abuse.
• Her cause of death was pneumonia.*
• Brittany wrote poetry.
I took a break from writing about the dead
and drinking from writing about the dead
to walk around my childhood neighborhood.
Everything’s for rent. Or for sale, for ten
times the amount it’s worth.
Palm trees are planted in front of a mural
of palm trees under the Ocean Park Bridge.
In the painting, the metal horses of a carousel are breaking
free and running down the beach. Why didn’t I leave
my initials in cement
in front of my parents’ apartment in the eighties?
Nikki had the right idea in ’79.
I walk by a basketball court, where men play
under the fluorescent butts of night’s cigarette.
I could have been any of their wives,
at home, filling different rooms in different houses
with hopeful wombs. Agreeing on paint color
samples with their mothers in mind.
I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out
hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.
They will worry, stare out the front window,
pray that privilege doesn’t bring home bad news
like some wilted head of a black girl in nascent jaws.
To say nothing of the owl who’s been here for years. I hear him
when I’m trying to write about the deaths I’ve admired.
I hear him when the clothed me no longer recognizes
the naked. I hear him while writing and shitting and sleeping
where my mother’s seven guitars sleep.
I hear him in my parents’ house,
their walls covered in my many faces,
My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success,
and I’m a car with a bomb inside, ready
to pull up in front of it and stop
pretending.
From: Amber Rose
to: Mindy Nettifee
date: Tue, Jan 12, 2009 at 1:27 PM
subject: Saturn’s return.
. . . I know this is gonna be a bad year for me. Last year was a bad year for all my friends and I felt for them. And I felt mine coming. And here it is. I’m just going to embrace it and hope a spark ignites.
I think I could very possibly be heading toward a full-scale breakdown in the next few months. I know, this is out of nowhere, right? I’ve been hiding it, I think. Even from myself. I am so creatively low and impotent, I know I have to make a move but in what direction . . . I don’t know. Where do I start? Get rid of Mom’s tchotchkes in my house? Get rid of ? Fire my agency? Go to London with David for a month and get some clarity or come back to L.A. for a month and find some clarity? What the fuck is clarity?
Can I just go the way of Brittany Murphy and say fuck it, do drugs until I drop and call it a day? What’s the point of taking care of yourself if you don’t even care about yourself? . . .
Great Names for Fake Actresses 2009
Linda Liftstrom
Ivory Soapra
Jan Power Strength
Maple Tomahockette
Rasputina
Iwana Oscar
Mesmerelda Burn
Shiver Softgold
I passed
but it was offered to me
but I passed
I was heavily considered for it
I killed in the room
but they went in a different direction
my agent couldn’t get to it
she had to be at Amy Adams’s baby shower
but if I manage expectations in my thirties
one day my agent might send an Edible Arrangement
to my baby shower
like Sam What’s His Face did for me
after The Grudge 2 soared in dollar bills
but sank in reviews.
When I went to Japan to shoot that film,
the director asked me to lose weight
through his interpreter. Every day I ate
the ironed meat and beard clippings of an iceberg wedge
off the bread of a Subway sandwich.
I should’ve passed
but it was offered to me
but I should have
an actress who is very famous now
was heavily considered for it then
she killed in the room
but they went in a different direction
her agent couldn’t get to it
the agent had to be at my poetry reading
but the actress managed expectations
in her twenties
and one day all the agents sent her rare orchids
and licked the stiff slits of her red carpet genius
and poured Up and Coming
all over my Down and Going
the auction of our bodies
passing each other by
between buyers’ hands
down and going
going
gone.
From: Amber Rose
to: “tamblyn, russ”
date: Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 6:36 PM
subject: Papa.
I hope that you are not disappointed in me.
I hope you aren’t taking this show not happening as hard as I’m taking it.
I need you to not give up in believing in me.
I need you to help me believe in myself.
I need you to not hit the bottle and stare at the television and be depressed the way I am going to do tonight.
I need you to be strong for me. Strong in the way that perhaps, when you ever felt like a failure, you could not be for yourself.
I need you to toast Mom to all that I have done in this short lifetime and say, my time will come.
I love you
Facts about Dana Plato for Poem December 2011
• Her film Pacino Is Missing was never released.
• She was fired from Diff’rent Strokes after becoming pregnant.
• Dana appeared on Howard Stern’s radio program, where callers assailed her with comments like has-been.
• Dana died of a drug-overdosed suicide the next day in her mother’s RV. It was Mother’s Day.
• A friend of Shappy’s has a recording of a frantic Dana Plato on a tape from an old message machine. She left it the day before she died.
• Dana’s son committed suicide almost exactly twenty-five years later. It was Mother’s Day.
• My birthday often falls on Mother’s Day. It is always the day before my mother’s birthday.
I’m the war I want
to end.
A woman of her word
not spoken.
I’m the war I want
to end.
Alone in my house, burning
all the wood and the bridges.
I’m the war I want
to end.
The persona, My Sharona,
phony bologna.
I’m the war I want
to end.
You’re good for nothing
and nothing’s good for you.
I’m the war I want
to end.
James Franco says
write me off like a sunsetting trend.
But that’s not a war I want
to start.
That’s the war he wants
to pretend.
I’m the war I want
to end.
From: Amber Rose
to: Beau Sia
date: Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 6:28 PM
subject: Here is what I started writing to Mindy
. . . I am ashamed to admit that I hate myself so much as to look in the eyes of the man I love and hate him for loving me today. To pity his love of such a failure. If I could close my eyes right now and never open them again, I would. I would do that.
I’m trying to write your poem, Martha Mansfield. But I can’t memorize your lines. You are the last on my list of actresses. The last one owed her ode. Something about a hoop skirt that caught on fire in 1923 and seared an epitaph into our memories. Only no one remembers you, respectfully. No one will remember me, either. We’re last spring’s birds’ nests. We’re the venison at the steak dinner. That’s all I got. I’m fresh out of sober soliloquies.
No more metaphors, no more similes. (See how I did that?)
Let me search you on Wikipedia, see if I can find some oil for the engine. But before I do, how about another pat on the ass for this glass of comatose that’s roofied my throat? Do you think maybe Charles Bukowski once drank this same thing and said that same thing, only without red lipstick? I took a half of a half of a little pill, Martha, I must confess. Now the keyboard’s letters are so soft. Double-you. Eye. Kay. Eye. So this is what it would feel like to run fingers over the top of rush-hour traffic! That long school bus space bar. The little black limos and hearses at either end, celebrating in their own ways. The keyboard feels like a thousand silk tiles. Like the tops of a hundred baby tarps at an Ant Art Fair.
Pea. Ee. Dee. Eye. Ay.
It says you’d wanted to be an actress since the age of fourteen. When I turned fourteen, Martha, I wanted to retire from acting. I had already lived so much. I got my belly button pierced and crashed my parents’ car. A guy went down on me for the first time. He had a labret piercing. I had slender arms, long and soft like a stream of milk into a baby’s mouth. I was young. Now I’m just still young. I had a baby’s face. Now I’m just baby-faced.
One night at a Hollywood party I met Leonardo DiCaprio. Think Buster Keaton, only minus some bravery. Leo didn’t flirt with me that night. I lined my lips with brown eyeliner like the cholas I grew up with in Venice Beach and wore a choker of silver plastic stars around my neck. I wasn’t his type. He wasn’t mine. But we did dance together for a few minutes. He in his black shirt and backward baseball cap, me in cargo pants and a red tube top. Shit, you probably don’t know what that is, Martha. It’s like a tiara for your tits.
After the party, my friends and I picked up some wannabes and some wannados, minus Leo, though I think a friend of his ended up with us. I don’t remember how we all got to the beach from there but the wind was in our favor, the amateur tequila throwing up in our buckets. We picked up another guy from the party who was even younger than us, who smelled like lemonade aftershave. His eyes were big sapphires resting in platinum cheeks. His grandmother must’ve been Elizabeth Taylor, we were certain. Our coreless trunks struck partial headstands in the shifting billions of beige, and our bras played fetch with the jaws of the Pacific. A sand-ball fight seemed like the right plan. Our only towels, each other’s clothes. We slid onward and over ourselves, toward the light of the pier, toward the frozen fireworks and whatever might be coming next. I was hanging on to Not Leo, and another fr
iend—Sonya I think her name was—clung onto the night’s biceps, testing our curfew’s strength. And you, Martha, making us laugh, pointing a finger at the crooked pier pillars holding up the rickety wood extension. “Don’t sneeze,” you commanded. “The whole thing might collapse in an explosion of air hockey pucks and baby shoes!” Your white dress crystallized with seawater, your plum waist belt now in your hand, dragging through the foam behind you like a soft tail.
Remember how you took us under the pier, where lovers and homeless huddled in a unified effort for warmth? In the low violet light, I searched a boy’s face for lips and leaned into my first kiss. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw you over his shoulder. When I closed them and felt his soft mouth splash into mine, our salts not saved for the sea, I imagined I was kissing you, Martha. I was kissing you.
“He can tell you can and will write ‘blammo’ poems (I told him I’d quote him), but that these were not them (for him).”
—Rejection letter from well-known publication
“You should write under a pseudonym. People will take you more seriously.”
—Well-known older male poet from New York City,
over a plate of expensive cheeses
© CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images
Dear men in Congress,
You think banning birth control is conservative progress?
You think sanctioning my ovaries won’t bring me to violence?
How about I tell you what to do with your caucus?
It is now illegal to think about me topless.
To keep your lotion where your socks is.
To refer to powerful women as monsters like those jocks at Fox did.
I am not afraid to cock block dick,
to sew an instructional video for rape kits to your eyelids and make you
watch it,
I’ll take away your golf clubs and gun clips,
I’m gonna fix this by getting YOU fixed!
Enough’s enough, kid,
come on stop that,
if you want to make this Law
then here’s my Law Rap:
You have the right to get strangled by a bra strap,
anything you sexualize with can and will get shot at
with a Glock cap,
I’ll shove your life in a duffel bag,
hand it over to a sex trafficker, let him smuggle that.
You wanna cuddle, Dad?