The stone dolls, excavated from a tomb,
are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child
to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room
my sister and I shared, their bodies light
and bendable, their eyelids mobile, hair
so real it tangled with our own at night.
But what we learned from them was only life -
we never pressed our cheeks to death like girls
who played with stone dolls did. The doctor’s knife
could not have caught my sister more off-guard
or left me less alone; I had my dolls.
Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard
with price tags. Even then they looked alive,
survivors with no sickness to survive.
-- First appeared in The Warwick Review, Volume III, No. 2, June 2009
-- Reprint forthcoming in Calyx, Volume 26, No. 1, Summer Issue 2010
