By Gretchen Berg

When dizzy Jimmy Stewart chases
creepy Kim Novak up the tower,
it seems like this confusing movie might

finally end, but no, it keeps getting all explained.
Vertigo is the only loser in the Hitchcock festival
my dad takes me to. The rest are perfect:

Margaret Rutherford disappears off the train
in the Alps, everybody’s head goes back and forth
in unison at the tennis match except for

the bad guy who keeps looking straight ahead,
Grace Kelly’s shoulders glow, Mt. Rushmore
looks as fake as the real Mt. Rushmore looks,

and Tippi Hedren lies picked to death on the couch
while we drink Cokes and eat popcorn.
Happy. Happy. Happy.

By Steve Luttrell

Pieces on a square board.
Each one symbolic
in its form.
It’s a game
and at the same time
not a game.
Each move a serious decision,
of grave consequence.
As life hangs in the balance
when you’re playing
with death.
One wrong move and
MATE!
Game over!

By Steve Luttrell

Oh, the horror!
the horror of it!
an actress seething sex appeal.
This is a poem
for Barbara Steele,
a dark erotic beauty
enigmatic and seductive
and pale to the point of ghostly.
Her eyes, a dark invitation
to a deep and dangerous place
of curses and castles
and corpses kept in crypts.
How ironic that this
“Queen of Screams”
would come to wed
a man named Poe.

By Steve Luttrell

In the beginning
is the name
and the name be

Ishmael

and this man went forth
an orphan to the world
that would receive him.
The story he would tell,
one of fate and retribution.

It was a hard world then,
where men would come together
to chart a common course
and with no care for prophecy
to take the devil’s coin.
A crew of men to man and sail
the whaler named

The Pequod

Sailing out from salt–stained
old “Nantuck”
with its captain so named

Ahab

at the helm.
A captain known to all
with a vengeance in his blood
for that curse–born whale
that glides the valleys
of the deep,
the one they’ve come to call

Moby–Dick.

A giant white Leviathan,
a harbinger of death,
all scarred and stuck
with harpoons forged in blood.
This captain would have only
one intention
to find and kill that damn

White Whale

that had left him as a
peg–leg from a previous encounter
but in the end, the whale
would win the day
and take that fated captain on
his last Nantucket sleigh–ride
while pinned to his side
like a bloody harpoon.

He was one now
with the giant white whale
Moby–Dick
on his descent to
the depths of a watery grave
with only Ishmael
left to tell the tale
of that great white whale.

And so it comes to be
until the sea gives up her dead
on that final day of judgment.

–Finis–

Moby–Dick: Warner Bros, 1956