Lovely Penguin

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