Joan, Hollywood, 1936
Once I felt my body something close to whole again, after weeping for weeks into my pillow when I was certain Mother had gone to bed, my sobbing kept quiet so she wouldn’t come running and swoop her owlish eyes down to me and the wet linen crown darkening around my head, couldn’t demand I cough the matter up! or we’d both be watching dawn seep through calico curtains like a foul, unwanted smell, once I’d stopped aching down there, where just weeks ago Billy O’Malley tunneled a crude path, where before there’d been but room for my modest monthly trickling, like streams I’d often skip across, barefoot, dipping my toes in frigid creeks beneath the pines with my best girls at camp, and even Father sometimes when he’d kick off his Red Wing boots, let the coolness lick his skin on our hikes up Temescal Canyon, in the L.A. spring, after the too-brief winter rains, yes, once the ruddy canyon of my private parts quit swelling, the scorch and burn Billy ignited so that I finally had to seek Dr. Harrison’s help, making him vow not to tell Mother or Father: Just give me the sulfa pills or I swear I’ll kill myself I said, and my body crumpled at his polished wingtips on the exam room’s icy tile so that I felt like a sad, trampled poppy Billy O’Malley had smooshed into the soles of his satin Punjabi slippers the Beachwood Canyon singer friend brought back from India and I had to telephone Dr. Harrison so he could treat my infection accordingly, and all I could think, looking up at the walls of the clinical room, at pictures of schooners sailing the sea off Catalina Island’s shore, was that I wanted to be one of those catamarans right now, racing full speed into the deepest cerulean distance, far away from this sorrow—the horror of my lashed purity and heart, replaced with foul-smelling flesh that felt like fire, and once, too, Dr. Harrison determined I was not— thank God—pregnant from my one night of red wine, Wagner, and Billy motoring himself through the drunken mountain of me, once I’d thanked Dr. Harrison and cried in his arms (he’d known me since I was a not-even-six years-old Mustard Seed reaching up to touch the perfume firmament of orange blossoms fluttering on the branches of his backyard’s Shakespeare theater) and he’d sworn never to tell as long as I promised to take better care of my body, maybe talk to someone? Once I’d put the dream of love-not-mean-to-be behind me, buried it beneath the sea grass my mind could still see bending in the wayward December breezes along the cliffs of Castellammare where I’d last held close my distant, elder cousin, my real love, his lips too briefly finding mine, yes, once I’d done all that, I was ready to surrender to Richard and the future he’d been imagining for us, building it like an actual dream boat, like the one we’d circle back to and admire on our walks around Marina Del Rey together, its pearl varnish with For Doll in turquoise cursive painted across the hull—nothing grand, but fully equipped and fashioned for a life of smooth sailing—stalwart for turbulence, but steered by a compass that could circumvent whims and betrayals, the chaos and conundrums of desire and abuse rampant in this industry of cinema I’d grown up around—no, none of that for me—a fresh tack, a clean beginning: I telephoned Richard on New Year’s Eve and steadied my sobs stowed below, kept them from winching up, yes, I cradled the receiver to my mouth and cast him my smoothest, sweetest siren call: Hey, Sailor, got any plans for the New Year?
Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and was commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange in September 2024. Recently, poems published by the Poetry Society of New York Jacar Press’s One, and Cleaver Magazine were nominated Best of the Net 2025. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize, and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, SWWIM, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.