Thirty years after Richard Speck murdered eight nurses on the South Side of Chicago, videotapes surfaced showing the convicted killer in prison parading in silk panties and sporting breasts reportedly grown with smuggled hormone treatments. After talking about the rampant sex he enjoyed, he said, “If they only knew how much fun I was having, they’d turn me loose.”
1.
Of course, you’re everybody’s bitch now,
your face aunt-soft, but still pummeled
and pitted, still that drooped dammit
of marbled landscape. Of course you are
slouch and winking sloe-eyed beneath
a Dutch-boy bowl of hair, pert pouted
areolas lazed on a pimpled gut, this is
what happens when eight women insist
on a winter rhythm inside you, they bless
you with feminine clock, sly locomotion,
with the hips they were just beginning.
With fabled cock crumpled backways
in panties of silk dark as a blue note,
you rise to walk, focused, overclicking
your sway like a practiced hag on the stroll
while, nodding gravely behind aviator
shades, your Negro lover wryly considers
the sashaying, ill-constructed hot mass
murderer mess of you. He is overseer,
brusque pimp. You are his gilded tunnel.
Between demanded fevers, you amuse him.
How’d it feel when you killed them ladies?
he monotones, in reluctant acknowledgment
of your stardom, your skewed rep, never
lifting his eyes to the camera, and of course
you had to say that you didn’t feel anything—
It’s just wasn’t their night—nothing at all
when the fatty spit in your face and said
she’d remember everything about the way
you looked, nothing as the screeching parade
of cheekbone and thigh turned your quest
for pocket change into a giddy little fuck/slice,
nothing after finding out that the little Filipino
whore had rolled under the bed to memorize
your ruined skeletal grace, foolishly denying
herself the impossible Wednesday of you.
2.
I was nine when your pebbled hangdog filled
the face of the family Philco. No one prepared me.
I nibbled sardines and saltines and twisted
the torsos of dolls while staring at the lineup
of neat nurses you had romanced and ended,
pictures always in the same order, all your girls
sporting puffed bouffants and hard white collars
buttoned to a point above their throats, and I
studied their faces, a tomorrow all expectant and
persistent in them. They were my first dead girls.
I practiced their names over and again, loving
Matusek’s white suburban splatter, the wide lyric
of Merlita Garguilo. In 1966, my parents, just
about a decade north, had clearly been deceived.
I was often alone with the perfect magic box,
Lucy and Vietnam one and the same, so no one
explained the frayed edges of narrative, grainy
shots of red-drenched beds, and you, you,
greasy pompadour, batter-skinned, droop-lipped
and lanky, my first killer within walking distance.
But before I knew what you wanted that night,
years before the televised daybreak of woman
in you, I was nine. You were always all over me.
I fell asleep under my Murphy bed, curled hard
against you, holding my own neck in my hands.