Issue 16 • Winter 2005 • Poetry

Dietrichesque

Charles Jensen

She was so old in Touch of Evil the director wrapped her face with gauze. Like a freaking mummy, same girl who once danced a table to shame in a Berlin nightclub. The muscles in her long thighs rippling like arabesques made flesh. Economists say her hips caused the Deutschmark to collapse; cunningly, she slipped into Hollywood smuggled by night, her limbs disarticulated into boxes marked "UFA." Sometimes she was a man. Sometimes she was a thigh. When dinner was served, they say she only ordered chicken and sent anything else back to the chef. Today we say That's Dietrichesque.

Charles Jensen is the author of the chapbook "Little Burning Edens." His poems have appeared in Bloom, The Journal, New England Review, Quarterly West, and West Branch; he was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. With Sarah Vap, he has published interviews with Beth Ann Fennelly, Lynn Emanuel, and C. D. Wright. He works for the Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University and at Rio Salado College, where he teaches film studies.

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