dolls.
To think—those eight blond heads
(four on either side) might protect
me. The night terror after night
terror that presaged later terrors
(equally dark) would not be stopped
by their hard-bobbled plastic heads,
those chewed pink scalps.
Why would they
save my body? Animate, and soft,
brown as it was. They didn't love me.
I loved them.
I brushed their hair (and they expected
me to). I rubbed their legs between mine
but only I came. They were pretend
but I never pretended. And I didn't
know. I privileged them, and served them
tea (and cookies when I could sneak them
into my bedroom which my mother
insisted I keep clean and crumb free).
I was crumbling and my dolls did not
stop it. They sat up straight on the pillows
waiting, while I held vanilla wafers to their mouths.
I left their hair all over the bathroom floor
when I coifed them—like a good little beautician.
~
Cotton candy. The old woman near Asheville
that touched my hair at the café said
that, and I obliged, said, Yeah, more cotton
than wool. Then immediately returned to the flaxen
hair of my dolls that I washed and cut
with my tiny fingers while I waited for my breasts to grow
conical and my own hair to be straightened down.
I'm losing
I've lost
the thread of my recollections, so you probably can't
follow me. Where was I? Rabbit holes. Yes,
there were so many back there
in my upper West Texas childhood. In my personal
bottom. And so many Alices. Alices everywhereeverywhere.
So popular. One year there was a rabbit infestation.
Did I tell you how many girls followed them downdowndown?
I'm repeating myself. I was a Vievee but but I wanted a rabbit too—
a fluffy white one with a pocket-watch.
But these were wild hares, some rabid—
tens of thousands of them with their long ears and rangy bodies.
No one cared what hole I fell down. I looked under the bed
every night. So scared. And held my dolls close. Squeezing them
into my ribs (like a momma) as if
they could ward off whatever came for me.
And when it did they were nowhere to be found.
