Michael Zimecki

WANTED

Female,
23 years old, five and a half feet tall,
slender build, blue eyes and fair complexion,
auburn hair, bobbed, originally blonde,
with the following identifying scars and marks:
a tattoo of two hearts with an arrow on her right thigh;
a bullet wound near the little toe of her left foot;
scar tissue on her right leg from a burn she got
in an accident when they crashed a stolen car.
She’d been burned before, of course.
Roy was faithless and didn’t really love her,
not like Ronald Coleman loved Vilma Banky in The Night of Love.
“Let all men go to hell,” she wrote in her diary.
Then she met Clyde, and went to hell with him.
Truth be told, they didn’t have much in common
(she wrote poetry; he was practically illiterate)
but he’d tattooed the names of other lovers on his skin,
just like she had done with Roy.
It always felt crowded riding with him
With Anne on one arm,
Gladys on the other
and the arsenal splayed across the back seat like some drunken whore,
well-lubed and smelling of stripper solvents,
each of his beloved guns named for a different girl.
Truth of it is
she never really felt wanted.


Michael's YouTube video reading of "Wanted":



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Michael confesses: "I began with an image of a wanted poster for Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the most heavily romanticized couple in the history of crime. I never believed the myth, so I mentally photoshopped Clyde out of the picture, and this is what I came up with, my take on Bonnie Parker."

MICHAEL ZIMECKI is the author of Death Sentences, a novel published by Crime Wave Press, and a winner of the First Golden Fedora Poetry Prize from Noir Nation, an international crime fiction journal. His crime fiction has appeared in Close to the Bone Magazine, The Dark City Mystery Magazine, and Hoosier Noir, among other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan.