Marilyn 100

 to celebrate Marilyn Monroe's centennial Palm Springs is putting on 4 days of events.  the biggest was today -- breaking the world record for number of Marilyn impersonators in one place at one time.

the city sold a packet of wig & dress. rather than get into them & becoming a footnote in the Guinness record books I optd to create my own piece within the gathering near the Marilyn statue to count those dressing up.  so I cleand up with the bar of soap I bought at Quaker Square 50 years ago. I pin'd my Marilyn pandemic mask made by Cesar Julio to a baseball cap. & I gatherd up materials for my piece. 

I had some Marilyn post-its. I brought them & askd people in costume to imprint their lips on a post-it & then sign it. I askd men & women   people I knew & strangers. among them were photographer Stephen Baumbach & dear Marshall Pearcy (Dottie from Les Dames du Soleil). perhaps the most interesting was professional Marilyn impersonator Shelley Michelle. she is an ambassador for Billion Dollar Marilyn Lipstick & was actually wearing it when she kissd the post-it.

I didn't get as many as I'd hoped. it was hot & I was juggling the post-its & the book they were going into & a pen & my phone as well as having a tote hanging from my shoulder. but I did create my own work.

POSTCARD FOM CLEVELAND

somewhere

in a drawer

or family album

there mite be

a postcard

Anna May Wong

wrote

while on a press junket

a postcard

whose stamp

was lickd

by a teenage fan

she enlistd

to help her

a postcard

on which mingles

the DNA

of a movie legend

& a young poet

a postcard

on which they live

together forever

______________________________

for the origin of this poem see my Facebook post for this morning

"A Litter of Lists"

 in Postcard Memoirs I wrote:

"compiling lists began early. I remember writing down lists for Santa but I also recall going thru mailorder catalogs & keeping a mental tabulation of the one thing I wantd on each page. once when I was home from school in bed with a cold I startd a notebook in which I listd my favorite actors & tallied the movies I'd seen them in. eventually I kept lists of nominations for my own film awards.   ..."

so even before writing poems there were lists. a while ago I got the idea to bring some of that activity together. I creatd a manuscript I calld "A Litter of Lists." here were the actual chapbooks of lists but also poems & other musings which include them. all this spanning 55 years of publication. because it's not a normal collection I wonderd if it wd ever see print.

then one day at lunch at Billy Reed's I mentiond it to the publishers of Sibling Rivalry Press. Bryan Borland nearly jumpd from his seat & thrust his hand over our plates of pie saying he'd publish it. we shook hands.

& now the day has come. the press will issue the book next month. here's some of what they say abt it: "Formally inventive and deeply intimate, A Litter of Lists blurs the boundaries between poetry, archive, and memoir—offering a singular exploration of memory, attention, and the art of preserving a life."

it's available for pre-order now.