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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haunting.