[Her language] isn’t clever dirt, and it isn’t really at all shocking—but it’s the kind women want, apparently. Women are simple souls.

Jim Timony, Mae West’s

manager

You’re

YOU’RE

Your hands your lips your hair your magnificent effervescence—

Vague as fog and turnip-hipped, a creel of eels

that slithers in stains. Dirty slate, you’re

Diamond Lil. She’s you, you say. You’re her. She’s I. O

Mae, fifth grade, we dressed in feathers and our mothers’ slit

pink slips, dipped into your schema and your accent,

aspiring (like you) to be able to order coffee and have it

sound like filth. And yet aspired to whom? Amazing

all these films and each cow-eyed character the same:

Catherine the Great, Margie LeMont, Peaches O’Day. I

grant, I never saw a single goddess go but you

rewrote her into you. Each maid a moon

orbiting your Mae. And she the same star always winking,

flaring out rotational names: Cave Girl, Sis, Tira, Fifi—

What’re you doin’ honey, makin’ love or takin’ inventory?

Mae West: Advice

MAE WEST: ADVICE

Ban tobacco: do bacon abed,

be delectable, collectible, a decent debacle.

Décolleté don’t conceal; acne, do. Be bold

and be toned, an octane-blond coed.

Be colonel not cadet, concede nada to doc;

date a cad and canoodle, be éclat on a cot.

Don’t lean on a deacon, be a dolt, a clone:

don’t bet on an Eden, don’t loot, don’t loan—

Be belle and ball, too, a deb Coco-labeled;

be ocelot, be lancet, be candle and cabled.

Canceled? Debated? Booed at to boot?

Elect to be tall. Don’t tan. Eat local.

Be oded, caboodled, be beacon and lect.

Don’t be a noodle: be cool and collect.

Marriage

MARRIAGE

Any dame that knows the ropes won’t get tied up.

Mae knows wit’s a waste on those who think

a woman is a sink of mind. Smart dames

edit out the spouse: rather get sent to Sing Sing

than tied in knots. A dame should take her own name.

She did. Tho ain’t that name turned into sign, her shape a stage

that’s trope? Rigid iteration, she smirked the same

at eighty as nineteen: a drawling monster roped

to her own shade. She’s a playwright. She’s a genre. “A woman

among men,” is what Mae said. “I’m new.” Then wrote

The Drag. Mae, did you get our unsure titters at the end?

Did you get you turned to gag? Prostitution’s

a more honest gig, you wrote, of marriage and the page.

And now your theaters stand dark. You got it right, it seems.

Hamunaptra, Dirt-Lip, Wag: everyone hates an institution.

Censored

CENSORED

I always believed in censorship: I made a fortune out of it.

Dalí nails Miss Bawdy: cave of lip-shaped couch and starry

eyes, a room dilated to empty: velvet space