Dolls

Written for a teenage poetry anthology about relationships.

How can you love someone
who yields so easily to the crush of your body?
Who submitted, so docile
to your fumbling hands in the back seats of cars?

You push her backwards,
posing her in seductive shapes on
on your dirty sheets while
She stares, dispassionate
counting the chinks in the ceiling
as your muscles spasm and you claw her back
in your sudden ecstasy

The other boys have their paper goddesses and
goth girls and
right hands in their pockets
You have your china doll

She’s not a real girl but
you can drape her over your arm at parties
and kiss her goodnight as her eyes wander
over your shoulder into the blank space beyond.

“ I love you too”
she murmurs the obligatory response
Some day, when your foolish youth has passed you by,
you’ll realize
that her words were as plastic
As her dead blue eyes.