Marilyn In Wonderland - Leza Cantoral

Joe is joined by Leza Cantoral. They talk about sex in lit, fairy tales, bizarro fiction, and more!

Leza Cantoral is the Editor in Chief of CLASH Books. She hosts Get Lit With Leza, a podcast where she talks to cool ass writers. She is the author of Cartoons in the Suicide Forest & Trash Panda & the editor of Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana Del Rey & Sylvia Plath. You can find her spending way too much time on FB, Twitter & IG @lezacantoral

You can contact the show at [email protected] - Just put WTR in the subject line.

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Art photo by Arielle Tipa

MARILYN IN WONDERLAND

Don’t look in the mirror,
Don’t look because you will see,

Marilyn,
Through the Looking Glass.

Her twin brains
Glitter and digest the celluloid dream.

The forest is thick
For those who wander—

Lost and found,
Crumbling Underground.

Where does the rabbit hole end?

I wander through the streets
Of New York City.

I see my reflection
In the shop windows,

Half expecting to see
Marilyn looking back at me.

Her body might be in the Westwood Cemetery,
But her heart is in NYC.

In NYC
She could finally disappear.

In NYC
She sought refuge from the swarm—

The camera eyes that
Stripped her bare.

You cannot X-ray
A soul.

Skeleton face,
Calavera of love—

I look for Marilyn
In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

She’s not there
But I find the Urn of Peter Lorre,

And I wonder why
He couldn’t afford a nicer gravestone.

Marilyn, tangled in Egyptian cotton sheets,
Wound up in her telephone cord—

A Hollywood mummy,
Preserved for all eternity.

Still she haunts me,
Phantomwise,

Marilyn moving under the skies,
Never seen by waking eyes.

She’s not in the dirty NY snow
Caked to the curb.

She’s not in the radiator that groans like a mechanical beast,
From the bowels of Mordor.

She found her voice
In the Actor’s Studio,

A bookwork—
Devouring Ulysses.

In madness, she walks,
Through mirrors far and wide.

She died in beauty,
Like the night.

A psychic in Greenwich Village
Tells me that my aura is white,

But I don’t believe her,
Because my shadows eat up all the light.

Dark twin
Devouring me—

Dark pairings
Of souls lost at sea.

I hear her laughter
Bubbling off the shore.

I find Marilyn in Key West,
In front of the Tropicana—

Her smile frozen in plaster,
Blowing her skirts to Cuba.