And on the subject of eyes.
Another eye poem which I love to read.
This is "Perla at the Mexican Border Assembly Line of Dolls."
"Her job was to sort through the eyes of dolls.
Snapping hollow limbs into plastic torsos
had been a soothing task for Perla.
Like arranging the peas back into the pod or picking up
spilled grains of salt one by one.
Since she was born without a womb
and her ears closed up because no infant's shrill had
kept them open, Perla's fingers had developed sensitivities
to dolls.
She exchanged her gentle touch for their rigidity,
which stiffened her bones to the wrists.
At rest her hands shut down like clamps.
But she could not refuse this trade.
Sometimes she became too easily attached
to the hands whose curvatures embraced the crooked joint
of her index finger.
She'd go home with her pocket full of arms too often
and would bury them in her garden in pairs.
A right arm with a right arm.
Left one with a left.
The fingers always pointing down like roots.
After seasons the only growth was the ache inside her bones
while her hands kept shrinking narrowing like stalks.
Perla had asked to be moved to heads.
Here she was appalled by how strands of hair
are jabbed in with pink hooks.
How noses and ears are pinched out and with what
brute force the mouth hole is ice picked through.
And for years she had equipped these dolls with arms too short
to massage themselves.
Sometimes she had sent them off without arms at all.
And she imagined the limbs in her garden digging
deeper into Earth like split worms madly searching
to comfort their severed halves.
So Perla requested the task of sorting eyes.
Eyes that sink into her thumbs the way
rosary beads cave in fingerprints.
Yet here she doesn't count or pray.
She only teaches how to dull the pain.
Her gift with a squeeze of her rigid fingers
is the luster of her callous tips, their stoic gaze.
The dolls give up the sensibility
in eyes that do not blink.
The eyes freeze over like the surfaces of lakes
while Perla's fingers feel again though everything she touches
slices clean into her most afflicting nerves.
With a pupil locked in place as if in ice,
each eye stares up accusingly at Perla
as she's about to push it into place.
A tack threatening to thrust back the fury of its nail."