One Less Than Veronica Lake

One Less Than Veronica Lake


Louise Brooks in a black cotton dress
texts outside a South Austin boutique
her thumbs passing over the keys as
if the smoke of the lord sniffing for
first-borns along the Nile miracles
of technology a strand of her hair
found on a scarf in an old trunk
tucked away in a museum in
downtown LA: now there
are seventeen known
clones one more
than Fay Wray
one less than
Veronica Lake

we could ride the train to
Lake Geneva & sleep where
Mary Shelley had her nightmare
ask her thirty-third clone if she knew
before the ship locked in the ice that we created
our own monsters nameless
as a thousand heathen gods
how they live inside us the spleen monster
the liver monster heart
lung telomeres growing shorter as we dry
in the coldness at world’s end
or Edgar Poe with his dead living
in the walls under the floors
the red hair of an orangutan old man of the forest
their clones will not take: they die & their
DNA dissolves like waves at the shore
the clues in their eyes staring
at concrete blocks

or Sir Walter Raleigh writing
a musical on the life of
Captain Kangaroo
& no one knew
who he was
who never
won a medal
in World War II &
Emily Dickinson sings
“o moon o stars o anchor
rope—the fog of the mountains
come down to the sea—count the waves
the women all weep—follow me down to their
bones, to their bones, to the salty breath
of their bones”


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on More Poetry