Dear Dolly
Scarr C.

Those are her awkward fingers,
stubby and bristling with loose skin.
If one were to use indulgent metaphors-
Cherry-white cobblestones,
a pin cushion of sorts.
Like gangling bracelets, the liquid rubies,
they leave slick gluey signatures on her arms.
Blood is sticky, and mama despises messiness.

Rivulets, rivulets, glorious red.
But the blood, it disgusts her, arouses her six year old soul.
Her nerves lie sleeping, the accidental lines anaesthetized
in a theorem of relativity.
Dolly hurts more than her hands, you know.

Now, dolly is drawn to a heaving, tiny chest.
The constricting spurting frothing matter
of arteries and vena cavas, and smatterings of blue
killing itself against her null dreams.

(Hush Dolly, hush.)

She persists in her sewing
Strange little limbs, a cracked eye,

Patience is a virtue, said the schools. And now I say this to you.

"Soon you will have your right leg,
your very own right leg!"

She ignores the discharge of snarling white that
seeps from the hips - shapeless, uninspiring hips.
And the slipshod art of black that scarcely shelters
a symphony of brittle threads:
cerise, aureate, oakgreen even
dirtyblue and peach, a pale kind of peach.

(She painted the hair herself. Dolly was supposed to
have beautiful sable curls, like a raven washed itself upon her
delicate cloth head. We shall keep that in the eyes of our mind.)

"You don't have fingers, Dolly-dear. But baby has.

O, the most darling of childs."

Tipy-tosey to the cradle, dexterously and sweet.
Stab shadows through their hearts least they linger by your
soles and impede you.
Baby, baby, the things of a iridescent fairy-book ensnare you. Sleep on.
The scissors are brandished, the light plasters upon its edge.
In goes Baby's little finger, evenly by the fibre-stained steel.

(Snip.)

She pouts, be quiet, Baby. Do you not listen?
And wrath twines about her brow while she snips, snips, snips.

Dolly, my pretty precious Dolly.
I'm sorry, but there was only the yellow thread left
I wonder now if you could, with shambolic thumbs
Tell me how well I did.
Mama never uses her thumbs. Mama uses the thin stick.
Baby listens now, he abides by silence. Swimming in burgundy waters
Pungent coppery waters
turning brownish now

Never mind you took his fingers never mind the
oddly-stitched mouth never mind mama screaming and screaming and
screaming into Baby's stickyred pillowcase

O Dolly, Dolly,
you were made with the highest embodiments of love.

{May.17th.2002}