Trout Fishing w/ Eve Babitz

Poem

Author’s Note: Eve Babitz and Joan Didion famously didn’t like each other. This is a poem based around the feud.

Our bobber was hot pink—stripper pink;

round as a gumball, but nowhere near teeth.

Babitz stood with barely bruised feet, a limp

cigarette hanging from her tangerine lips.

She drank wine from the jerry can, cold grape 

funnelled down her chest; the oozing matriarch. 

Spinning the reel, she ranted and raved about 

Didion—that old pot-boiling tragedian with 

freckles and a papery thin smile. No fish were caught, only lipstick and torn pages from a journal. 

She left at the full moon, but she haunts like sweet

marrow unshaken from the brittle bones of a fraud. 

I find Babitz in the bathroom of a dollar general, 

smushing her lips together in the mirror like a trout. 

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