Doll Head

Scary, my children say, catching sight of her —
nested in rolled-up socks in the little left-hand
drawer where she lives—the porcelain neck
hollow and chopped, cheeks whose paint
scraped behind a toddler or wore off in rain,
mouth pursed like a newborn rootling in sleep
for a nipple, eyes that won’t click shut if I
tip her back, the way my husband tilted me,
slow-dancing, long ago, in a steamy move.

Scary, meaning who would tear off a head
and drop it in a leafpile, as if my children came
intact from tackling arm-wrenching taunting
boyhood, and never shed a part to get away.
Or scary, that I might have kept some piece
of them, original, they meant to lose, might
nurse it back to life, as if I had not dropped
my wife-and-mother form. I rock myself;
I teach myself the steps and dance alone.

My children’s soft lips smirk. They roll
shiny eyes. They are embarrassed for me;
also tickled, maybe, to have caught me out.
I am still the one the pack corners, the dreamer,
the odd prophetic child at bay, the one they know
to cut off, cut out of the games, playing a game
of her own devising, her spirit’s only half
understood necessities. Such a child does not
explain. I don’t make up excuses now,

don’t tell them how I press the hard skull
with its carved suggestion of curls lightly,
briefly underneath my palm while I dress
for public view as an old widow. How
the curve fits. How I let her rest, just so,  
tenderly shutting the drawer. Scary is
not to bless the broken, not to attempt
these salvages, these temporary stays.

Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of a collection of poems, Take in My Arms the Dark, and the long-time editor of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review.