In other words

A Barbie my sister got for Christmas fourteen years back

With platinum blonde locks that pushed out of her scalp

From pores bigger than her aqua irises.

She had blue eyeshadow like glittery gorilla glue

That wouldn’t even come off

When I dunked her in the kiddie pool out back.

 

Barbie’s birth went like this:

Wrapping paper littered around the living room

My sister occupied with something else

My hands pulling at cardboard and plastic

small fingers finding unpleasantness at every sharp corner

untwisting the steel wires that kept her locked 

to the printed background of a tropical beach—

I remember thinking how the ink of that landscape 

would burn green and blue

if placed on a campfire.

 

Barbie’s demonic smile was satisfied in being freed

her robotic limbs were aching to swish awkwardly across the carpet

aching to lie inhumanely at the foot of my bed

and sneer up at me through the glow of my mosaic night light.

Even though my comforter shielded me from her

I could never look away.

 

Barbie left us to work on the third aisle of the local second-hand shop

She likes to laugh at people who are browsing

and remind them of their childhood trauma.

 

(All of her reincarnated selves have amassed infinite amounts of information that couldn’t fit into all of the file folders in the world.)

 

Sometimes when I’m at the thrift store, 

I see her leering at me through the knicknacks.

You might notice, though, that she only wears one shoe.

 

The other is carried around in my pocket. 

Religiously.

I take it out as I’m brushing my teeth

It's polished and buffed on a 2x2 inch hot-pink, cashmere scrap. 

I wipe off my makeup and place the mini pump on a mini pillow—

a permanent installment on my bedside table.

It casts a protective spell around my room

Keeps the mean girls away

Keeps my makeup running in the pool

I look like a kind hag in my bathroom mirror and

I dream easily without blonde spiders grinning up at me from my bedroom floor.