The Dolls
Helen Wickes


The girl two farms over
had every imaginable kind. She had a roomful,
her shelves stuffed full of dolls. My desire to own
any one of them left me gasping for air.

It was clear that my perfect doll
would yield up its secret, the intimate knowledge
of the place where words come from,
and where they go to when there’s no one
around to speak to them.

I would have settled
for the dumb-eyed raggedy doll, or her
with the fat white porcelain hands, or her
with the glassy blue eyes that rolled back in her head,
as if she might faint this instant.

I’d have killed to possess
that girl’s lowliest doll. Okay, I was strange,
but admit it, you too were a weird little kid. Didn’t you
ever have a need so sharp that if you tasted the edge of it,
your tongue might bleed?

No, the girl said,
you can’t have any, they’re mine, mine. But oh,
don’t you—didn’t you—stumble out of her house,
squinting into the blazing daylight—hungry
for whatever’s still out there, still hungry?