[ ] we star in opposite directions,
a woman of her own grotesque—
we’ve learned to be good at strangeness.
Her rainbow folded in half, she pled for a tenderness
she was never given, confessed
[she’s] learned to be good at strangeness,
the place where great joy meets even greater sadness.
Voice of limping menthol bell, the best
[ ] star [ ] opposite [ ],
her liver singing ruin, ruin. [ ] Reflection,
a half-dead mirage of [ ]
[ ] strangeness.
In red, she was skeletal & amphetamine, corrections
for the mother, always one second
[away from reward]. We star in opposite directions,
[ ] but where has the protection
been? Home is not a lesson:
[ ] we star in opposite directions,
we’ve learned to be good at strangeness.
About “Tabloid for Judy Garland”
Judy Garland is someone I’ve admired since I was a child, and I still have a VHS collection of her films I can’t bear to get rid of, especially Summer Stock and Meet Me in St. Louis and the Andy Hardy series where she played opposite Mickey Rooney. She always played the misunderstood brunette whose sex appeal wasn’t at the forefront, and that quality continues to resonate with me. Because she wasn’t the typical bombshell, she managed to complicate what we valued in our heroines. But she was a bombshell. She killed it in “Get Happy” in that sexy tuxedo jacket and fedora and, of course, in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” where wistfulness was made tangible. Those Technicolor moments were such a stark contrast to her personal life, and it seems that, to this day, her vulnerability is more a celebrity than she herself.
The “tabloid” poems feature infamous female figures, and my objective of this project is to rewrite the pejorative from their narratives—I’ve done Jayne Mansfield, Lupe Vélez, even JonBenét Ramsey, and I have plans to do Selena and Theda Bara. While these are tribute poems, the deconstructed villanelle also serves to mimic the hyper-omission and sensationalism of celebrity tabloid journalism. As someone deeply interested in ways women’s narratives are crafted, along with the unstated assumptions they carry, I wanted the refrain to house a collectivity—the “we” functions as space where the writer and the subject share, borrow, reciprocate, and celebrate their complexities.
Iliana Rocha earned her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Her work has been featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as Bennington Review, Blackbird, and Third Coast. Karankawa, her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is available through the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma where she teaches creative writing.
Judge Hadara Bar-Nadav writes of Rocha’s “Tabloid for Judy Garland”: This whole series of poems is wonderfully inventive and fresh, but “Tabloid for Judy Garland” is particularly powerful and balances innovation, tone, diction, and content in evocative ways. I was immediately struck by how absence is articulated through brackets, a kind of self-erasure that mirrors the self-erasure via drugs and alcohol hinted at in “her liver singing ruin, ruin.” This ruptured villanelle captures glimpses, glimmerings, and fracturings of a life all at once, from the “rainbow folded in half” to a woman in red, “skeletal & amphetamine.” Visceral imagery, diction, syntax, and sound work hand in hand in such well-wrought lines as “Voice of limping menthol bell…”. The “we” in the poem is also a resonant and heartbreaking choice; the “we” who “star in opposite directions” are strangers at last and loss lingers on.
