"Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale" by Nicky Beer
Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale
Pretty In Pink (1986) It was always me in that shaggy suit jacket, the battered dance shoes, the fuck-you-rich-boy pompadour. When you cannot wail your rain-shot, neon-blasted love to the red-headed girls of the world, Otis Redding is your only recourse, your body rigid with borrowed soul. Who knows better than another woman to try a little tenderness? Only the weary girls understand this. Only the ones making knife-brimmed style from what the dead throw away. Only the ones with a ready wisecrack for each of the thousand heartbreaks that crackle across the unrequited radio. Dames, we sigh, sipping the long light in the unmowed front yard, our hidden breasts swaying under secondhand shirts like palm trees. Isn’t she—? asks the light. Isn’t she, we reply. Appears in Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed Editions, 2022)
Audio: Nicky Beer reads “Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale”
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.