The Femmes

 

The Mystery

 

The Danger




 

Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, Neo-noir

 

GITTES
(staring intently)
There's something black in the
green part of your eye.

EVELYN
(not moving)
Oh, that...it's a flaw in the iris.

GITTES
A flaw...

EVELYN
Yes, a sort of birthmark...



By the river, in one of the cabins
shuttered with planks, its lock
Twisted; a bunch of magazines flipped open,
A body. A blanket stuffed with leaves
Or lengths of rope, an empty gin bottle.
Put down the newspaper. Look out
Beyond the bluffs, a coal barge is passing,
Its deck nearly
Level with the water, where it comes back riding
High. You start talking about nothing,
Or that famous party where you went dressed
as a river....
You know your friends complain. They say
You give up only the vaguest news,
    and give a bakery
As your phone. Even your stories
Have no point, just lots of detail: The room
Was long and bright, small and close,
    angering Gaston;
They turned away to embrace him; She wore
The color out of season,
She wore hardly anything at all; Nobody died; Saturday.
These disguises of omission. Like forgetting
To say obtuse when you talk about the sun, leaving
Off the buttons as you're sewing up the coat. So,
People take the little
They know to make a marvelous stew;
Sometimes, it even resembles you. It's not so much
You cover your tracks, as that they bloom
In such false directions. This way friends
    who awaken
At night, beside you, awaken alone.

From Gin
by David St. John



 

...You'd just as well / try making love to an angel, one of those dark ones / who can pull you down through the sheets and you're falling through icy clouds.     from Angel Face by Richard Garcia

 

The Danger
Anne Sexton
HER KIND

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearraning the disaligned.
I've been kicked around all my life.
Now I'm going to start kicking back..
Annie Laurie (Peggy Cummins)
in Gun Crazy

Maria Montez, 1944

You bring out the Mexican in me.
The hunkered thick dark spiral.
      The core of a heart howl.
The bitter bile.
The tequila lágrimas on Saturday all
        through next weekend Sunday.
You are the one I'd let go the other loves for,
    surrender my one-woman house....

      Sweet twin. My wicked other,
I am the memory that circles your bed nights,
    that tugs you taut as moon tugs ocean.
I claim you all mine,
      arrogant as Manifest Destiny.
I want to rattle and rent you in two.
    I want to defile you and raise hell.
I want to pull out the kitchen knives,
dull and sharp, and whisk the air with crosses.
      Me sacas lo mexicana en mi,
        like it or not, honey.

    - from You Bring Out the Mexican in Me
        by Sandra Cisneros




--from Cement Dress by Terry Wolverton--


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Photo of shadow woman making bed by Thomas Hopker/Woodfin Camp



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