Hollywood Forever
Leah Mell
It’s August, and the sky is all reflection:
shallow pools and white marble and empty champagne bottles
in the corner where the famous and forever are buried.
Saturday nights, and a buddy-cop comedy
projects upon the mausoleum.
Hundreds of people, headstones, picnic blankets.
I’m sitting under a palm tree. I can’t remember
why I came. Peacocks drink from the pools—
lurid—like they can’t believe their luck.
They murmur mythologies of emerald-dyed grass
and tropical flowers. I repeat, steadily:
I know, I know, I know…
I don’t know what it means to believe
so much that the truth disappears.
I want to be buried under a willow. I want only
the ghost of Jayne Mansfield at the funeral,
laying a bottle of pink champagne on my grave.
No God.
Leah Mell is a genderqueer lesbian poet and translator. At present, she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her work has appeared recently in Rough Cut Press and Lunate. Her artistic obsessions lie in noir, persona, morbidity, and the queer body. She is fond of ghosts and the sea.