The Girl Detective

            "'So, it’s come to that,' she said. 'You’re jealous of policemen.'"
                —Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

The girl detective does not date
She sits at home       eating a piece of devil’s food cake
with red frosting       She sits at home
with a pregnancy test
       Icebox light       slats the kitchenette

The girl detective rolls seamed stockings down
one at a time, slips       off her crepe de chine
and navy pumps           In dotted swiss pajamas
       she yanks out the lousy Murphy bed
flips on her hot-bulb Hawaiian lamp
       the hula dancer’s       pampas skirt sways
       hips like lava             skin like kola nut

The girl detective       sets her honey hair
in frozen orange         juice cans
                               She double-checks
her clutch purse for Sweetheart tweezers, compact, blush
then badge               and gun

       Foundation caramelizes       in her vanity mirror
                   a bullet lipstick               ricochets
across the room       The girl detective dreams
of handcuffs                             slanted grillework
lost keys and prison                 movies where the girls
        are Lana Turner blond

       All her exes broke
the law       or moved to Hollywood
in search of starlets         sunglass swimming pools
palm trees                       and palisades
       green velvet theatres sinking               into mossy film noir

The girl detective                            keeps a corkscrew handy
things always do go south              it’s best to be prepared

Sideshow Banner: The Engagement of the Fat Lady and the Pocket Man

Jacques played my love-struck contract dwarf in tents
from Brou to San-Maur-des-Fossés.
He brought me saucisson, champagne,
and Gerber daisies wrapped in cellophane;

he stroked the triple strand of pearls that ringed
my clotted custard double chin
so tenderly, I almost thought
his sawdust-kneed proposal was sincere.

The banner painter captured our romance
on canvas. There I sit, enthroned
on gilt aluminum, my teeth
bared in a fox-trap grin, my dimpled bulk

blown up to fill a wincey sideshow wall,
forever fat, just twenty-two.
The joke was that a gentleman
that small could fall for someone oversized

and listing, like an alpine île flottante,
our false long looks some mastodon mistake.
I fed him tarte tatin, marceled my hair,
and kissed his biscuit porcelain brow,

but when the tour closed, he pocketed
my Carbanado diamond ring
and caravanned to Bruges with Snake Charm Elle.
These days, although the cook-tent steams

with boudin blanc, I find it hard to put
on weight. Bereft, I slouch beneath
our faded courtship scene, my heart
a punched-in bladder on a birch-bark stick.

Hilary S. Jacqmin is an MFA student at the University of Florida. Her poem "Wedding Album” was published in Best New Poets 2011: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, edited by D. A. Powell.

More poems? Yes, they are here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.