HlNl Doll
– At a bodega in Merida, Mexico
Baby in a green surgical mask, baby in a hospital gown, baby in a box behind the rows of shelves of First Communion on dolls, of white dresses and veils with roses to wear when you become the Bride of Christ, baby in a mask in a slit-open box and I would like to touch her, no, I would like to hold her, kiss her Rushed plastic skin, I would like to sink to the concrete Boor, press the unfused bones other skull to my breasts, press my lips on her drawn-on plastic hair, her sick baby smell, all butter and dust.
The Pregnant Doll
– At The Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, London
She’s never an ultrasound’s shadowed green, slush and slur of a heartbeat
her plastic body is only visible if you remove
her mother’s stomach the size and color of a vanilla wafer,
stomach sliding off neatly to extract the baby, baby
like a battery snapped into the back of a digital clock
Baby who never cries. Doll who wears high heels and a pink nightgown
over her emptiness. She’s thin in an instant. Never
an N’s bite and scrawl, never a monitor black-strapped on her skin,
never an injection into the cervix that doesn’t work Her body
opens easily, with a finger flick, then closes. She’s never
birth sick or tired of being a household for another body.
She’s never a cut steak leaking blood onto a plate.
Bye-Lo Baby, Patent Applied for, Stamped in Black Ink on Her Chest
Baby in blue velvet, baby in fake lace.
Baby with lips set in a grim thin line.
Baby all celluloid, baby glass eyes stuck in her sockets.
Baby forever half-sleeping.
In the NICU, in an isolette, in the museum behind glass.
Bye-Lo Baby when invented first needed a model.
My baby,
not my baby,
baby I don’t want.
Baby I love best.
My daughters say: why can’t you have another baby?
The inventor searched and searched. Hospital to hospital.
Baby, one eye open, baby watching from the corner, from the edge
of the bed.
Model baby! Baby three days old, baby copied.
Baby drawn-baby drawn and quartered?-Baby photographed.
Baby whose mother is where-
Baby patented. Baby made and made and made in a factory in Germany.
My daughters say, I want chat baby! Make a baby for me!
All dressed-up baby, baby in her velvet, boxed-up baby,
baby back-storied,
baby inventoried.
Another baby?
Lo Baby, Bye Baby, Baby Bye Bye at the bedside, baby in the museum
baby taken from your mother ‘s arms.
Two-Faced Doll, Germany, c. 1890
Go ahead, now, activate the crying mechanism deep in side the body. She’s all pulleys, wired tight with ropes and miniature chains inside her hollows. Yank the string at her waist and she turns mean. Four bisque teeth: watch her mouth open and snap shut like a change purse. You will want to pour her full of dimes, you will want to shake her head till it knocks against her shoulders, yank the papier-mache hood off to show her baldness, yell back at her yelling face.
Frozen Charlottes Found in the Excavation of the Muni Metro
In ditches, trenches, inside drywall, under
rock foundations, stuck and tunneled deep in dirt.
Penny Babies: one cent for each small body.
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Dolls made to teach girls to avoid their vainness, to cover
up on sleigh rides at night, to wear a wrap, a cape, a coat.
Don’t walk out of this house in that too-short skirt.
Don ‘t let your bra strap show or boys will snap it: it’s snowing!
Always wear shorts under your skirt
or the boys will flip it up over your head.
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When the archaeologists find them, buried and jumbled, they are
all white bone. They are cigarette ash.
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You will be unwrapped, like a gift, your scarf slipped from your iced face.
See what happens to the bad girls who won’t listen?
In all the stories about you, you are a lesson.
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In the doll factory, if blemished, if cracked, if anything chipped or broken,
you were scuffed one by one in the walls of the building.
You were insulation against winter.
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Sit like a lady, the man admonished me. I was in third grade.
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What is the lesson?
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A series of linked ghost bodies. Light, naked, iced.
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Tell me why in all the stories about you, you are already dead?
