Hedy Lamarr Villanelle With A Recurring Line From Palm Royale
by Dustin Brookshire & Denise Duhamel
A forgotten woman is the most dangerous woman of all.
After starring in a Joan of Arc flop, she lost her mystique.
A forgotten woman isn’t afraid to embrace the fall.
She's dangerous as a wave demolishing a seawall.
Hindl invited her to meetings but wouldn’t let her speak.
A forgotten woman is the most dangerous woman of all.
When she's a bombshell, male scientists find her banal.
Ingenuity, no. The military wanted Hedy for being chic.
A forgotten woman operates in a space to see it all.
They wanted Hedy to be Belle of the War Bond Ball
after seizing her patent, worried she was a sneak.
A forgotten woman is the most dangerous woman of all.
A foremother of WiFi, frequency signals left her enthralled,
an inventor worthy of a four-page spread in Newsweek.
A forgotten woman paved the way for Bluetooth calls.
Hedy said to be a star is to own the world, a long haul
from MGM star to inventor to retiree stealing Clinique.
A forgotten woman is the most dangerous woman of all.
Word to the wise: don’t ever push her against a wall.
Dustin Brookshire is the recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship awarded by Poetry at the Sea. His chapbooks include Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025), Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), and two additional collections. He’s the editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Editions, 2024) and the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). More at dustinbrookshire.com.
Denise Duhamel’s (she/her) most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. More at linktr.ee/deniseduhamel.