Doll

Photo © & courtesy of Darren Bokor 

Sometime Doll by Forrest


Doll. A doll. A doll face. Not a doll face. Sometimes not a doll face. Sometimes not a doll face looking. Sometimes not a doll face looking around. Not a doll face looking around. Not a face looking around. Not a face around. Not a face. A face. Face. 

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Her Best Ought to be Good Enough by Bill 

On the road the excuses are genuinely a terrible bother to crunch, the gravel kicking up around your arms, eyes squinting in the sun but it is mostly all the same brand of story, which some would call a lie, and others a framing of the reference. Blame both of them for where they come from or just let them be. There wasn’t anyone here immediately before us but there are bones around, so keep it and hold and press it to yourself like a child. 

Are one’s battles are best left waiting? Tell them to meet you in a diner while you go out to a bar across town? Is it better not to fight if it means you’ll never lose, or will it happen whether you’d wish it or not. Weave. Wove. Wow, wonders all over again stretched across your skin, tables out in the nighttime with all our sky overhead. 

Splinter post breakups, hard edges for the hardliners hardheaded holdouts for the dawn. Fait accompli. 

The old man with the dead star for an eye, and the old woman with a train that circled inside of her mouth across from you on the subway. Outside again in the rain letting it fall around and upon you watching a young girl wrapped in only a green sari spin in the middle of the sidewalk with arms outstretched into the storm as the silk clung to her body, alight in her dizzy trance feeling the world wind away, she the mainspring revolving away the tension of the planet, taking the tension off of gravity, baba yaga in the younger aspect atop the spinning dreidel of the forest spirit. Signs and wonders watching young parents stare wide eyed through an infant. 

Save the cat. Please. At the very least, save the cat. 

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The Interview by Alan 

When something looks manipulated in that early 21st century way, he tends to suffer a simultaneous sense of disbelief mixed with terrific delight. “I think it’s the juxtaposition of things or, what did they use to call it, the ‘layer’ on top of ‘layers’?” he asked me when I interviewed him not long ago. There was an element of mischief in his voice. The ball had already been set in motion. He was all over the feeds. Not because of the fire. Not because of the dumpsters/junkyards/abandoned domiciles. Humans were interested because he actually worked with the physical: dolls, bottles, iron…grass even. Here was an artist not interested in the virtual but rather with actuality. Things over ideas. Or the ideas in things. “There used to be many of us,” he said. “I have outlived them all.” He was 27. This is only one of the things from our conversation that resonates when I look at the image of his work today. 

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Airhead by Johanna

Puffs of stuffing fell out of holes in my seams before my cold skin hardened slowly like chocolate shell. My brain went all googly like my eyes when I had eyes to see – the slow lopsided shudder, the black speckled blue of my iris suspended in plastic glass. I prefer it this way, truly. Empty-headed can be so refreshing, except for the eerie sense that I am forgetting something. 

I remember certain things – lollipops, shade trees, spiders, writing with pencils, dog kisses, swinging until my toes touched the sky, the smell of blue nail polish and black markers, a photograph of the sea, the windows rolled down in the car, someone telling me I'm pretty. Pretty doll. Now, I am nobody's baby. I don't know what fault brought me to this wasted lot, strewn amongst the trash, translucent and perched on the neck of a milk jug #2, but I prefer it this way, truly. Empty-headed can be so refreshing. 

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Baby Bottle, Baby Bottle --- Cracked My Head on a Rusty Can by Lyle 

And now I think I'm delirious. Crazy as all hell. I can feel that rust creeping into my blood. Oxidizing the iron in my blood. I feel strong for just a minute but I'm not so sure that it has anything to do with the oxidation process. Probably more to do with the wound in my head. Perhaps this is what the trepannated feel. Liberation and then emptiness.