Smoky big-haired replicant femme-fatale from the future!
Still catching up, so here’s my Noir poem for day 9.
I actually found an IMDB list of the Top 100 Film Noir and then created a poem using only (mostly, give or take a few joining words) their titles – so it’s a found poem which, because of the diction of Noir titles, feels very noir-ish, of course.
AND, as I failed to write a cinquain for day 5 (I went ‘off-piste’ that day), I’ve written it in three cinquain-ish stanzas! Take that, NaPoWriMo: defecit catch-up prompt-fusion!
Sifting through the Noir titles, it strikes you how fearful they sound of the feminine, of male-female romance: so the poem ends up being a little bit about that femme fatale figure.
Although on the other hand, as Margaret Atwood wrote in Unpopular Gals (a first-person story on behalf of ‘wicked women’ in fairy tales) from the collection Good Bones and Simple Murders: “I’m the plot, babe, and don’t you forget it.”
Killer’s Kiss
Pickup
on South Street, caught,
now in a lonely place:
the desperate hours are a stray dog,
Laura.
This gun
(raw deal) for hire:
a nightmare alley is
the narrow margin’s kiss of death,
Gilda.
Your scar-
face: kiss me dead-
ly, boomerang wrong-man.
I, the woman in the window,
confess.