TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Last week, our team attended the 2025 AWP Conference in Los Angeles. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs — the conference is an annual moment to gather together colleagues across the writer world. This week’s episodes include audio we recorded onsite, bringing together many voices, Slowdown style.

Today’s poem, by Los Angeles’ most recent poet laureate, begins with one of the city's most famous mysteries — and goes on to consider reclaiming the stories of women in this land of reinvention.

The Ways of Remembering Women
by Lynne Thompson

Do you want to know about the black dahlia
or do you want the truth about Elizabeth Short?

You may not be aware: there is no such dahlia 
and yet, lovers of crime focus on the dark of it,

the mystery connecting Miss Short to its rare
essence which, some say, means enduring grace.

I thought it was the newspapers who coined it,
eager to make a buck featuring the brutality of

that January, 1947, but no. It was the sailor men
who frequented the waterfront along the Long 

Beach pier who gave the raven-haired Betty her 
final moniker. They could have called her Rose

for the tattoo on her left calf; could have called
her Star  for those who said she was an actress,

“well-behaved” and “sweet” despite the hideous 
tableau she was found in; her torso, head, and 

legs savagely detached, each from the other;
her body drained of blood; her mouth slashed

from one ear to the other. Skull pulp-like as it
roiled in the tall grass of Leimert Park. Did you

know she was pregnant, her fetus removed post-
mortem by her killer? That a Chandler—yes, one

of those  Chandlers—was rumored to be the daddy
and still, we can’t get enough of her, of anything

that made her macabre. See: TIME  magazine,
2015, describing many confessors to her murder,

everyone looking for their mainline to notoriety.
See how, even now, you want to know who  did it

as well as the horrific facts: Short was alive
when a butcher’s knife scrolled calyx to corolla.

		     II

See how you don’t remember just four years
before the Lady Dahlia, there had been another

Betty (neé  Nuñez) although there are reasons
that you forget. She was, it is said, a pachuca

who hung out along Sleepy Lagoon, listened to 
Central Avenue jazz and junked old folks’ tales

of docile Mexicanas who sported plucked eye-
brows, darkened lips & an up-do held in place

by “rats.” How many of you remember those 
10 days in June, 1943? If not, re-read News-

week’s  piece not-so-subtly making judgments
about “loose girls in L.A.’s Mexican quarter”;

indicting them as delinquents waylaying so-
called innocent service men with hip-swaying

& jitterbugging. “The girl-companions of zoot-
suiters” (so dubbed, whether or not it is true,

by the media, and by whites) with their own
style. Many were just girls who were forced

to testify against friends, or face detention,
or worse. Yet we only remember them, if we

recall them at all, as mestizas: cultural hybrids,
traitors, slaves, sell-outs; like many women

who came to L.A.—see: Nuñez and Short—
to find different identities and found them

as virgin or whore in someone’s film or play,
or as the unremembered to the rest of us.

What can they ever say about what it is we
all say about them? To paraphrase an old

African: until the lioness becomes a historian.
some vengeful animal will always tell her story. 

“The Ways of Remembering Women” by Lynne Thompson from BLUE ON A BLUE PALETTE © 2024 Lynne Thompson. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions.