In Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying
everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.
It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.
Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers
in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.
There will never be another breakfast. I die of a heart
attack. Perhaps the night never pauses its seesaws.
Perhaps I resign myself to this fate: a siren is a temptress
who doesn’t deserve human love. Because beauty
is my emergency. Sincerity too. Because being seen
has a different meaning to someone with my face.
There will never be another breakfast. The French
toast sits untouched with the blackberries. So I speed up
time, reckless, toward a world where I don’t exist.
Eight months later, Audrey Hepburn walks down
Broadway in a black Givenchy. This is the role
I’d have died for. This is love that’s reciprocated.
Beside her, Mickey Rooney plays Mr. Yunioshi,
another tapeworm-eyed uncle with a limp. And I yawn
at another generation of white men in yellowface.
Before him: Roland Winters, Sydney Toler, Warner Oland.
There is applause for them. The laughter is constant.
I have played their daughters—their pretty but untrustworthy
incarnates. There is no second generation for actors like me
but I’ve often pined for them. My progeny. Girls with tar-black
widow’s peaks, who stumble across spotlights in purple tights,
taught to be meek. Girls who inherit my warnings, victories,
and failures, too. But for these girls, there will never be
breakfast. I will travel through all time searching for them.
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