A LITTLE NOIR ANTHOLOGY

The following poems will someday be incorporated into the final Noir pages:
The Attraction, The City, The End.

. Laurel Ann Bogen
. Lynn Emanuel
. B.H. Fairchild
. Liz Gonzalez
. Carol Lem
. Lawrence Raab
. Weldon Kees


Laurel Ann Bogen
from HOLLYWOOD HILLS NOIR

Aberration of weather
studded the sloe-eyed city

I could have gone
deeper pried open
the locked vault below —
combustible fossils bubble
in tar and petroleum beneath
Wilshire Boulevard — the jacaranda's roots
divide the house
city of my birth
Los Angeles
erupts in a mass
of violet blossoms
each Spring
the profusion is uncontained
by stucco, migration
and charter amendments. . .

The view from the terrace
is bright but noncommittal
Nature needs tending, of course
Every few years the plates shift
the photogenic councilman is arrested
and someone takes a fall

That's how I came here
not by choice but by calling...


Lynn Emanuel
AT THE RITZ

How and where they met is cause for speculation.
All up and down the avenue, blondes — lacquered
in intelligence, sarcasm, babeness, and money —
gossiped into the ears of investment bankers
so impeccably groomed you could see them
checking their Windsor knots in the chrome
toes of their wing tip shoes.

He was so handsome that when he walked in
the room just rearranged its axis from south
to north, the scene came to a halt and hovered
as though the weight of him had tilted the planet
and everything was beginning a slow slide off.
Martinis tremble in their fragile glasses.
Against her mink a gardenia erupts in a Vesuvius

of white. These two haven't met. Until they do,
her job will be to pout beside her wealthy father who,
weighted with an enormous white mustache
(what brilliance: in this scene, hair is money),
is lying in the sedate and lacquered gleam of the coffin.
Above his stern but kindly visage some pricey
lilies droop. He's dead; she sulks.

But this is all a long way off. Now we're
at the Ritz where, as we've seen, the joint's atremble,
the tablecloths on there table so white, so limp.

They look like they have fainted. When he walks in,
she says, there is no here here, let's go down the street
to Izzy's. The street's grown quiet. Not even the moon
can move. Its grainy bulk, stolid and sinister at once,

won't budge. Behind them — the pale, small stares of the hotel
lobby, a taxi hauls a smudge of exhaust into place,
and a town staggers to its feet as he follows her like a prisoner
into the sentence of this story.


B.H. Fairchild
A MODEL OF DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, 1940

It's a bright, guilty world.
- Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai

But there is no water.
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The oldest Mercedes in California adorns
the crowded foyer of the L.A. County Museum
of Natural History, and babies shriek like bats
in the elevator that lowers my daughter
and me to the basement. There, among the faint,
intermingled drifts of ammonia and urine
from the men's room, phantom display lights
luring shadows over the inventions of Edison
and Bell, and dusty monuments to a century
of industrial progress, lies the mock-up L.A.,

whose perusal has been assigned to my daughter's
fourth-grade class in California history.
Fallen into ruin, its plexiglass sky yellowing
and covered with cracks, the fault lines of heaven,
it is soon to be hauled off with the duplicate
rhino horns and kachina dolls dulled with varnish.
Sarah circles the city, her face looming
large as a god's over buildings, across avenues
and boulevards from Vignes to Macy, then back
around to the borders of Beaudry and Eighth Street,

where in 1938 my father sat alone
in the Tiptop Diner and made tomato soup
from a free bowl of hot water and catsup.
Across the street was the office of the L.A. Times
where several upstanding Christian men had conspired
to steal the water from the Owens Valley.
Our farm became a scrap yard of rotted pears,
a bone yard, irrigation canals dried up
and turned to sage. A thousand lives in ruin
while L.A.'s San Fernando Valley rose

from desert into orange groves and, overnight,
made a fortune for the city fathers. One day
our hayrack caught fire and there was hell
in the air. On the roof, my father saw
in the distance a Hindu city with camels,
water buffalo and four elephants: Gunga Din.
Water gone, vultures circling, Hollywood
was moving in. We followed Mulholland's
aqueduct south to L.A. and the cool dark
of the Pantages Theater in blazing August

while my father hunted for cheap housing,
shacks with swamp boxes near Echo Park.
Each day he rode the classifieds until
the bars looked better, drank warm Past
at Mickey's Hideout where Franz Werfel
sang Verdi arias and told him stories
of Garbo, Brecht, Huxley, and Thomas Mann.
Later, he worked the rigs on Signal Hill
for a dollar a day, slinging the pipe tongs
and coming home smelling of oil and mud.

The days: morning light opening the streets
like a huge hand, then the bruised fist
of evening, that incredible pink and blue
bleeding into night, and the homeless
in Pershing Square claiming their benches again.
That summer he was shipped to Okinawa,
the Japanese trucked like crates of oranges
to Manzanar near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley,
and I wandered among the jacarandas
and birds of paradise at the Public Library

reading the Communist Manifesto
and plotting revenge. But I was a child.
Now I study Blake's Songs in rare editions
at Huntington's Museum and Botanical Gardens
and imagine the great patron and his pals
looking down on L.A. from the verandah
and sighing, Bill Mulholland made this city,
as the sun pales once more beneath a purple fist.
So, here is the Hall of Records, and Union Station
where my father, returned from the Pacific,

swore that we would head back north again.
Last night on television a man named Rodney King
showed how the city had progressed beyond
its primitive beginnings, how the open hand
of the law could touch a man in his very bones.
And there, staring back from the west end
of Spring Street, is my daughter learning her lessons
as she bends down for a closer look, pale blue eyes
descending slowly over the city, setting like
twin suns above the Department of Water and Power.


Carol Lem
FAMILY BUSINESS

When it was Ah Wings Cafe
on Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood
they'd come to study their lines
in the noirish booths by the kitchen
where steam and cigarette smoke
merged with the shadowy faces
of Newman, Brando, Mitchum,
who took breaks by walking
to the Vine Street newsstand.
For years, my mother kept
Raymond Burr's five dollar i.o.u.
hoping he'd remember,
before television made him an icon.
When the business moved
to Little Tokyo in the 50's
and became Lem's Cafe,
Keye Luke and James Wong Howe
would enter through the back door
asking for their hom yu, as my father
sipped the egg flower soup
and nodded them
toward the pink table cloths
reserved for special guests.

It was almost forty years
since my mother, an extra
in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms,
looked out at the damp pavements
of Limehouse. But, still, the gas lamps
rising through the mist and fog
glowed in her eyes
while she flirted with the actors
and directors slumming J town.

Hosting big parties
during Nisei Week was not the role
she and other Chinese haunted studios for.
But while the men became Japanese
stereotypes in the 40s war flicks,
she was working on a marriage
with the man who got her away
from the railroad tracks on Alameda
only to fit her onto a tract
of property his father owned.

So when the old man decided to turn
an abandoned movie theater into a restaurant
and cast my father as cook, Mother
found her audience in a reel that never
stopped running, Family Business.


Liz Gonzalez
CATHOLIC DEATH

                              Her
                             hairs
                      shiver as she
                    lights a candle
                on the altar to save
             daddy's soul charring
        in purgatory A good father
        not a good man Cheated on
        mama His biker buds say he
      picked up his cracked head Got
      on his knees Recited the Act of
        Contrition Police report states
            they found him under the
                   front tire Inside she
                    aches God never
                        forgave him


Lawrence Raab
THE ASSASSIN'S FATAL ERROR

        When in doubt have a man come through a door
        with a gun in his hand. — Raymond Chandler

He comes through the door,
the big gun in his fist. He says
"Nobody's going anywhere."
Nobody was, nobody's
even here, except
me and this bottle of scotch,
and I'm used to waiting.

He tells me to explain
about the pearls because he knows
ways to make me tell. However,
I know nothing about them,
nothing about Mr. R. or The Big Man,
and nothing about Oregon where I
have never lived at any time in my life.

Perhaps I'm lying, but he's convinced,
although he will shoot me anyway,
which I understand.

Perhaps I say, "What kept you?"
Probably I just finish the scotch,
which is third-rate but effective.

Mine, you understand, has been
a temporary disguise, which may or may not
be explained at a later time.
Its importance to the story
lies in the discovery of the body
by the detective, tomorrow.

I also turn up three chapters from the end
as a Doctor, where I can be trusted
even less than now, when I still have
this death to get through.

"There must be connections,"
I tell him. "There always are.
And it's smart to leave
the witness silent, get the job over
and get out of town."

The gun wanders around the room.
"Listen," I tell him. "Anything
can happen. But this could be
the fatal error. You don't know
anymore than I do."

The long tube of the silencer turns toward me.
I consider the finger on the trigger,
the sound like somebody coughing
upstairs in an old building,
and now the single bullet
suspended in the air between us.

You could ask: But what did I expect?
And I would have to say: Only this.
Nothing but this.


Weldon Kees
CRIME CLUB

No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quiet dead. The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Weslyan basketball team
Scattered with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: "To be killed this way is quite all right with me."

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.