Lovely Penguin

This one is more or less self-explanatory.  It deals with the issue of trauma and whether it’s better to remember or forget.

The magic eraser
By Marie Gordon

Hand me an eraser
A magic eraser
For the phrase
“What doesn’t kill you…”

I’ll smudge out the second line
Because what doesn’t kill you
Never leaves you
With sweet nostalgia

Hand me an eraser
A magic eraser
And I’ll tell you the story
As I smudge it out

Turn my memory
Into black rubber dust
That falls off the granite
And lodges in the grout

Hand me the eraser
The magic eraser
And don’t call me a victim
Or a survivor

Just hand it over
I’ll bow to my weakness
For a hard rubbing out
Of this tarry sludge in my mind

Oh sweet amnesia
You are kind
As humans never were
Not to cherish murdered hearts

Not to love the sweet terror
The beauty of remembrance
And the cold screaming sweat
Us men so idolize

Maybe it’s the estrogen
That makes me want to give up
All the prideful glory
Accompanying horror

For the magic eraser
That wipes out shaky hands
And darting eyes
And revives the tiny dreams
Of a bubbly optimist

This post goes back to some of the themes in my earlier poems (”my feeling of figmentation” and “on being a commodity”). It’s really about the eerie fairy tales that become women’s lives and how we immortalize these tales as something beautiful and alive when they are in fact tales which encourage women to be comatose brides and Snow White stand-ins. Anyways, that is my rant… here is my poem:

The patchwork princess
By Marie Gordon

The floppy patchwork doll
With round black eyes peers out
Under her red-brimmed cap
In a felted dress of scraps

Plastic pupils once shined
Although they never lived
Her plaid ensemble matched
She was loved and propped and left

She’s a still little corpse
She died a child at most
That never bled a drop
Never had a single cell

A plushy parasite
That loved, traveled, became
A figment of a girl
A relic of innocence

Oh to polish her eyes
To re-sew her gaffed side
To uncrinkle her dress
To see her in toddling hands

As though she never died
But stitched her own small cells
From giggles and dances
And thin-woven youthful games

If the cobbler could sew
Tiny cells that divide
That resurrect girlhood
With wooden needles and thread

Then she could be so real
As to dance and be fooled
And to learn and to live
In a cruel but soulful world

But she is propped and left
With the fairy tale books
Which narrate eerie tales
Of sleepy benevolence

A beady set of eyes
Dusty scratches and tears
Wrinkled by tiny joys
Which never belonged to her

She cannot speak to tell
A story that is shared
By a girl and her doll
A tale of sleeping beauty
Which is woven but never wakes