Girl Gang by Juliet Cook
The girls in this gang may entice the type of men looking for a bad girl in the traditional sense, and it is this that the girls are expecting: onlookers who will succumb to their machinations. An allure is presented where danger stems not only from what they’ve put into their mouths but what their lips can speak. “girl gang #2” is a narration of revenge and paltry fits. Although here, the kind of revenge exacted is not what is expected. The acts of “she,” the unnamed subject, become like urban legends, an expanse into myth, where
Like a poisonous rumor started and passed on from one cherry-glossed mouth to another, the details become fluid. But this girl gets her revenge, then beats “her own secrets into smithereens/ so nothing can steal them so she can torture them/ into stories with alternate endings” (25-27). The girl who keeps her secrets to herself can have the pleasure of “licking the salt off her lips/ juice drizzling down her chinny chin chin” as she savors every bite (32-33). She is also the one who will have the pleasure of asking, in the end, “who is the little pig now”, though lacking the interrogative punctuation, it is really more of a mocking statement (34). The feminine secret is her strength and solidity as well as her identity. In “girl gang #3,” identity is everything. The girls are named, and there is power in the naming. The reader finds the nomenclature to be tied in with identity in the mini-biographies provided as introductory character sketches, listed under the category “special skills”: Here the language evokes Plathian rhythms, where a gang member who calls herself The Paper Cut Queen uses a “typewriter to chop her foes/ into perfect stanzas, clean and bloodless and unsettling/ as a magician cutting a showgirl in half” (15-17). The skills the members have are presented in concrete metaphors for what are really their powers over language and writing. Lulu the Mechanic can make a typewriter “a finely tuned weapon” with words, to be sure, that could kill (9). Someone like Darlingtonia “strikes/ in corners, in dark spaces, under beds,” can reach, with words, the hidden things, secrets and subjects that give her poems teeth (24-25). But the gang also has a secret. They are, underneath it all, just girls: “sometimes they’re just a gaggle of giggling/ green facial masque monsters” (32-33). After the introductions of “girl gang #3” are made, the material that follows depends on the reader’s character-recognition. The poems then become nearly inextricable from the body of work, at times depending on one another for meaning, much like the gang members themselves. “girl gang #7,” for example, picks up where “girl gang #6” leaves off, the incipit of #7 making the initial reference, then merging into Priscilla’s story for the remainder of the poem. There is a definite sexual energy that runs like an undercurrent throughout most of the work. There is “the sexual thrum” referenced in “girl gang #6,” which is built into their personalities as a pinpoint to their identities (16). “girl gang #4” offers up evidence of this as well, detailing their proclivities, including Bananas Flambé’s “pornographic alternate reality” (7). In this gang, it is partly that sexuality that acts as a bonding agent; it is also something that holds its own power. When a new girl shows up, “Priscilla looks up hungrily;/ growls, ‘What a great pair of eyes you have!’” (32-33). The proverbial big bad wolf does not try to conceal the desire. The sexual intonations tend to be darker, containing abnormal fantasies, some of which have “something to do with dirty lambs wool”, some which it is best not to inquire after (29). No wonder that, when fresh meat steps in, “The entire gang advances” (40). By “girl gang #5,” something else is becoming evident in the body of work. The members of “girl gang #1” are teen queens taken through the adolescent rumor dramas of “girl gang #2,” after which the résumé of “special skills”, “gang initiation rite” and the “gang secret” are detailed in “girl gang #3,” then move toward sexual awareness and exploration inherent in young adulthood, as evidenced in “girl gang #4.” By “girl gang #5,” things are beginning to look chronological. Here the member CandyDishDoom frets “over niggling thoughts/ like maybe 34 is a tad too old to be involved in a girl gang” (8-9). By this time, the girls are engaged in concerns like Botox treatments, “the hasty infiltration of gray hairs” and all the self-doubt and realizations of fading youth that this stage implies (6). But by “girl gang #6,” things have the appearance of order again, or at least order as it is in girl gang-land. This time it’s a not-exactly-love triangle replete with tantrums of the eye-shimmer-pitching and I’m-changing-my-name-because-it’s-too-much-like-his variety. As in “girl gang #3,” the names are descriptive of the personalities, where “Bananas Foster might have some vanilla tendencies,/ but there’s no denying his dark rum”; while he cuts his bananas lengthwise, as is true of the dish itself, “the reckless Ms. Flambé/ slices them into uneven chunks” (15-16, 18-19). Whereas “girl gang #6” plays on naming, “girl gang #7” is more concerned with the continuation of a story. Picking up where “girl gang #6” left off with the newly-named Bananas Flambé (she now calls herself The Spiked Pineapple), she “nurses new wounds” while Priscilla preps for her shift at a donut shop that is as full of eyes undressing her “out of the same old pink dress” as any gentleman’s club might be (1, 11). But then, she herself “is a product”—one with “an expiration date” (28). The pleasure of this poem is primarily in the imagery and language: “Pregnancy scares, swizzle sticks,/ swivel stools, stirrups. She rips open a small pastel packet/ as the piped-in doo wop fluff pumps” (16-18). She, the product, is sugary and set to expire, as full of cream puff fluff as the pastries she serves. As we were reminded in “girl gang #5,” the girls may be nearing expiration for the last bastions of girlhood. “girl gang #8” is a foray into the inner workings of The Paper Cut Queen—“the quiet one”—the daydreamer who, while “suffering a lapse/ in her stanza chopping abilities” (a lack functionally shown in the poem’s form, where this is the only poem to consist of one stanza only), fantasizes about being caught and frisked while attempting to smuggle microfiche out of the library (25, 1-2). “girl gang #9” is another poem whose focus is attributable to its character, but this time has Darlingtonia’s dark world and imagination at its center. “girl gang #10” is the final poem in the series and, appropriately, not so much an obituary for its members as a gossip-column type follow-up like “What Are They Doing Now?” only this time around it is more like, “See How They Met Their Bitter Ends.” The Paper Cut Queen arrives at the end of her life having
All the members are killed off, save Darlingtonia, who “still lives in the root cellar”, the most likely habitation of hidden identities and the subconscious (21). The interdependence and interconnectedness of the Girl Gang poems uphold a collective strength and feminine unity. Not that they’re feminist, exactly, but a strong sense of maintained identity for the members’ activities as writers emerges on a rather strong note. While some of the poems may not stand alone, their success lives in the language, imagery and cohesion as a unit.
Girl Gang and other hand-bound publications are available from Blood Pudding Press. Find them on the web at www.bloodpuddingpress.etsy.com.
Cynthia Reeser is the Editor-in-Chief and founder of Prick of the Spindle and runs an imaginary commune on an obscure island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, populated largely by green spotted elves and and the odd troll dressed like George Bush. In her spare time, she is a staff writer for a military newspaper, where she writes a weekly book review column. She also paints when the trolls become too annoying.
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