Shopping Cart
    items

      July 29, 2010Catch Me, Alfred, I’m FallingRachel Inez Lane

      Man, I could be a Hitchcock blonde. I’ll have shades of white gloves lined up like criminals
      on my dresser, wear them when I cup a man’s face in my hands and hiss, Believe me.

       

       

      Hitchcock blondes survive in the wild due to mirrors, and lips so red they stain sheets,
      ties, love letters and breakup notes left on the table under the daisies next to the noose.

       

       

      When I brush my hair I will be able to see my attacker out the corner of my vanity,
      but since it’s a false setup, he is now my lover, we’ll have a picnic where I feed him

       

       

      secret sandwiches on stiff stationery bread with Dior spread, straighten his lapel,
      and sigh in his ear, Let’s go watch blah people through the binoculars.

       

       

      He’ll stay up late drinking with cigarettes and undone ties, troubled by not knowing my
      true story: How I grew up on a farm in Michigan where my father slaughtered pigs,

       

       

      how my brother Theodore was oddly quiet and built bird houses. He won’t know the tired smile
      my mother would give after she broke the necks of chickens I named. He’ll never know

       

       

      how Hitchcock saw me in a Sears ad for dishwashers wearing my best oh, my! face,

      my tricksy mmm face and flew in through my window, perched himself on my mantle

       

       

      and taught me how to make a proper gimlet. We discussed Truffaut and the philosophy
      of escaping in heels. He ordered me to write I am Grace in the air thirteen times with my foot.

       

       

      Oh, I’d be a Hitchcock blonde with a pointy bra that could impale an infant’s eye.
      What a life it is to be seen from onyx angles, but under velvet lights, to hide clues

       

       

      like the bubble gum inside my alligator purse. I’ll peek through my glossy fingers,
      watching as my man wrestles the killer to the ground, waiting for my cue

       

       

      so I can start running to his musk, chin up, palms up and hair blowing
      in the faint breeze of a fan a boy is hired to hold. A Hitchcock blonde who

       

       

      dies elegant, because wouldn’t it be sad to grow old in an A-line dress when you
      look like a B or a D or worse, an O? I’d rather be lifted onto the gurney, practically

       

       

      floating. Hitchcock watching as I am covered in a satin sheet. He’s gnawing a cigar, holding
      a lily, his arms around the sobbing boy with the fan, next to the brunette who scowls when

       

       

      the EMT says, “My god, she’s light as a ghost.” Hitchcock replies, “Sir, she’s no ghost
      but an angel, a blonde, the best victim, like virgin snow that shows the bloody footprints.”

      from #32 - Winter 2009

      Rachel Inez Lane

      “Last year I moved from Koreatown, Los Angeles, to the middle of nowhere in Tallahassee, Florida.”