WEBVTT

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And on the subject of eyes.

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Another eye poem
which I love to read.

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This is "Perla at the Mexican
Border Assembly Line of Dolls."

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"Her job was to sort
through the eyes of dolls.

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Snapping hollow limbs
into plastic torsos

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had been a soothing
task for Perla.

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Like arranging the peas back
into the pod or picking up

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spilled grains of
salt one by one.

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Since she was born
without a womb

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and her ears closed up
because no infant's shrill had

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kept them open, Perla's fingers
had developed sensitivities

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to dolls.

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She exchanged her gentle
touch for their rigidity,

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which stiffened her
bones to the wrists.

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At rest her hands
shut down like clamps.

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But she could not
refuse this trade.

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Sometimes she became
too easily attached

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to the hands whose curvatures
embraced the crooked joint

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of her index finger.

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She'd go home with her
pocket full of arms too often

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and would bury them in
her garden in pairs.

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A right arm with a right arm.

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Left one with a left.

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The fingers always
pointing down like roots.

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After seasons the only growth
was the ache inside her bones

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while her hands kept shrinking
narrowing like stalks.

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Perla had asked to
be moved to heads.

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Here she was appalled
by how strands of hair

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are jabbed in with pink hooks.

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How noses and ears are
pinched out and with what

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brute force the mouth hole
is ice picked through.

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And for years she had equipped
these dolls with arms too short

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to massage themselves.

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Sometimes she had sent them
off without arms at all.

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And she imagined the limbs
in her garden digging

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deeper into Earth like
split worms madly searching

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to comfort their severed halves.

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So Perla requested the
task of sorting eyes.

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Eyes that sink into
her thumbs the way

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rosary beads cave
in fingerprints.

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Yet here she doesn't
count or pray.

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She only teaches how
to dull the pain.

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Her gift with a squeeze
of her rigid fingers

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is the luster of her callous
tips, their stoic gaze.

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The dolls give up
the sensibility

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in eyes that do not blink.

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The eyes freeze over like
the surfaces of lakes

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while Perla's fingers feel again
though everything she touches

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slices clean into her
most afflicting nerves.

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With a pupil locked
in place as if in ice,

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each eye stares up
accusingly at Perla

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as she's about to
push it into place.

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A tack threatening to thrust
back the fury of its nail."

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