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Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944
See how the silver snaps in a lone spot,
the sound flirting with coyotes,
castrated foghorns, distant siren.
Observe how that polished body curves
in the strategy of lights, how its voice
is like a parody of mourning,
and so even more mournful
immersed in its high-pitched joke.
Admit that some other instrument
would fail—wood-honeyed curve,
funneled brass—when what’s needed
now is a tongue with the chill of steel.
Watch how the thighs hold that music
steady, how the dust and moths draw
closer to the song, a song that’s dying
even as it hovers in the dark,
a lost mouth moaning vowels
that are too close to your name.
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Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
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Marlene Dietrich, by Luana-Beatrice Lazar, 2014.
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