& also how a box of porcelain dolls looks
almost like one body. Nine dresses
flowering into one another, eighteen
arms stretched up & each claret-red mouth
painted perfectly shut. My mother sells them
to the consignment shop for ten cents
& a tiny dusk darkens in her girlhood. Not weeks before,
for the first time, she woke to a startling of blood
between her legs over teeth-white sheets—I’m dying, I’m dying—
& her ditch-silent mother filling the bathtub
with bleach. Even the street cats in heat were bleating too—
I’m dying, I’m dying—& she learned a lot
that summer: which ways not to walk
alone at night, how to hush-up & shut
her goddamn knees. She started to watch
more carefully how her own mother drew
two perfect lines up the back of her legs,
saw eyeliner disappear like a dirt road
slurring behind a hill. When they took her
to the barber shop, they held her shoulder & her ponytail–
orange as a gourde—was severed at the root. She watched
it fall from her like a rag-doll, pillowing
onto the floor. At home, she tucked the soft thing
into her nightstand drawer—we are all cursed
with something to care for—she thought
of the tailor measuring the length
of her thigh, his hot hand reaching up into her
skirt. How she told no one
of those nights she snuck
outside with a saucer of milk, stood at the mouth
of the lightless alley—called & called & called.
