Saira Viola

UNRESOLVED STORY ON THE BUTT END OF AVENUE B

She’s wrapped in biscuit leather and lizard thigh highs
Drunk in the afternoon she stumbles into The Bikini Grill
there’s an MTV special on and Debbie’s snogging the microphone with
her trademark blond shag and her XXS skinny black tee that whispers
I’m soooo SEXXY
A fatso with a big walrus moustache takes a couple of swigs from
the bottle and toasts two sequined eyes and a lost dream. He could
only think of her sickly smile it had an exquisite savagery -inexcusably
GREEDY
A crystal waving eco poet talks in stilted B movie lines
He wears a rainbow poncho and cut off Levis
He believes ANARCHY is kool
sews up all the bad ju ju in his life with bum note mantras
A lemon faced junkie is pissing cherry pink urine in the bathroom stall
The pimpy DA sealed his mouth with GOLD
Three stick up men in black ski masks appear in the doorway
and stake their ground
A petite spangle of light stares at sunken vampire eyes.
This is the moment where cliché dissolves into a bucket
of Terry Gilliam magic
A flurry of bullets
And a stash of cocaine now that feeling evaporates
The language of blood is screaming
No one wants to talk Noir theory but there are four dead bodies
slumped on cheap plastic seating
Turn up the Jam!
There’s two pink ears in the trash can
A sputtering nightmare
A gash of regrets in a red satin bra
An off duty PI wears his varsity baseball cap back to front
and combs the scene looking for MOTIVE


Saira's YouTube video reading of "Unresolved Story...":



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Saira confesses: "This poem was inspired by a harrowing news story. A mob style hit in the middle of the day. The report discovered that the net of corruption extended to the DA’s office. These monstrous killings, now an everyday vignette repeated all over America at all levels of society. But, at the heart of the scandal these murders were triggered by the key elements of classic noir: lust, jealousy, and betrayal."

SAIRA VIOLA s the author of Jukebox and Crack Apple & Pop. Benjamin Zephaniah has praised her "beautiful twisted imagination," and Heathcote Williams (RIP) her "hypnotic explosive writing style." Viola is a Warwick university law graduate, Pushcart Prize Nominee (2017), and was nominated for Best of The Net three times. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Vautrin Magazine, International Times, Mü Magazine, and other publications. She is currently working on her next novel.