Beauty in the Decay Series #7
My first and only Barbie. She’s about 50 years old.
This decay – her baldness – I find it difficult to see as beautiful.
Her bald head is so vulnerable and tender, but I feel embarrassed for her.
I used to make Barbie and Ken kiss, and then I’d leave them, entwined and passionate, under blankets.
They come in boxes now. Twisty ties keep them in place.
A poem that starts with Barbie and ends with dead pigeons in marigolds….
Waitwaitwaitwaitwait
Barbie tied up in her box,
twisty-ties choking
her wrists, ankles, neck.
A window for watching.
The brain-damaged girl
drew Barbie’s face,
the steady scratch-scratch
of her #2 pencil.
That was when a boy
came to my office each week
to scream Fuck Shit Bitch
as he punched Playdoh.
A healer told me
to be a tree.
Send my tap root
down to the core
of the earth. It zoomed
ferociously, grotesquely huge
from between my legs
forging a trajectory down
there where there is no end.
But now my tap root
is a drag.
While walking in a garden
it crushes cockle shell rows.
It bursts through car floors
to destroy highways, bridges.
Disasters trail behind me.
I grow weary of all the required
repairs, facts that need fixing.
Back then we lived across
from a pigeon shoot.
The injured ones
would flutter over and roost
clumsy in our eaves.
Mornings we’d find them
still warm, lying in a pool
of marigolds.
Attentive to the intersection of nature with human-built things; how nature will have its way.
– photos and poem by mary macgowan
