When the dark and carbon-hard pavement curves during the rain,
I become aware of my own breathing each morning before morning.
Elizabeth Short:
Black Dahlia:
When I hear fingers drumming impatiently on window panes,
mist and spray make the street mirror me, a temporary looking glass.
Elizabeth Short:
Black Dahlia:
Elizabeth Short:
Black Dahlia:
If I try to feel the lines inside me, the places where my seams conjoin,
the water knows where to go, it seeks its own, in drains, in vapor.
If my neighbor had not hanged her socks on the clothesline last night,
this awareness is a distorted form of immorality for us insomniacs.
Elizabeth Short:
Black Dahlia:
When I am upside-down in atmosphere, double-exposed here in air,
I keep on living inside my head, as of yet I cannot escape any lower.
Elizabeth Short:
Black Dahlia:
“Surrealist Games,” by Suzanne Muzard, Elsie Houston, and Jeannette Ducrocq Tanguay appeared in the “Surrealism in 1929" issue of the Belgian journal, Variétès.
From the author:
“In Surrealist Games, I play with a writing game used by Surrealist artists to explore a relationship between Elizabeth Short and her more famous public persona, The Black Dahlia. Some people theorize that Surrealist ideals were at play or even to blame for the so-called Black Dahlia murder, so this poem plays in that strange space.”