Epilogue by Amber Tamblyn

March 3, 2015   Epilogue   Amber Tamblyn

I took a break from writing about the dead and drinking from writing about the dead to walk around my childhood neighborhood. Everything’s for rent. Or for sale, for ten times the amount it’s worth. Palm trees are planted in front of a mural of palm trees under the Ocean Park Bridge. In the painting, the metal horses of a carousel are breaking free and running down the beach. Why didn’t I leave my initials in cement in front of my parent’s apartment in the eighties? Nikki had the right idea in ’79. I walk by a basketball court, where men play under the florescent butts of night’s cigarette. I could have been any of their wives, at home, filling different rooms in different houses with hopeful wombs. Agreeing on paint color samples with their mothers in mind. I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out hunting at night like premonitions of future sons. They will worry, stare out the front window, pray that privilege doesn’t bring home bad news like some wilted head of a black girl in nascent jaws. To say nothing of the owl who’s been here for years. I hear him when I’m trying to write about the deaths I’ve admired. I hear him when the clothed me no longer recognizes the naked. I hear him while writing and shitting and sleeping where my mother’s seven guitars sleep. I hear him in my parent’s house, their walls covered in my many faces, traces of decades of complacence. My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success, and I’m a car with a bomb inside, ready to pull up in front of it and stop pretending.            Copyright © 2015 by Amber Tamblyn. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This poem appears in the epilogue of my new collection Dark Sparkler, a book of poems about the real and fake lives and deaths of child star actresses. The epilogue contains a series of metapoems about my experience and journey writing the poems about the actresses.” —Amber Tamblyn   Amber Tamblyn is the author of Dark Sparkler (Harper Collins, 2015). She has been an actress since the age of nine and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit: Katie Jacobs Most Recent Book by Tamblyn   Dark Sparkler (Harper Collins, 2015) "My Childhood" by Matthew Zapruder "Early Memory" by January Gill O’Neil "They Call This" by C. K. Williams Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.