• I. She Had Some Dolls

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls that were porcelain and told stories at night.
    She had some dolls that were wood still crying its lullaby of leaves.
    She had some dolls that were cardboard and felt meaningless and plain.
    She had some dolls that were fabric that tore too easily into rags.
    She had some dolls that were splintering red sand carved from distant lands.
    She had some dolls that were perfect china and didn’t want to be touched.
    She had some dolls that were beautiful origami paper and feared scissors.
    She had some dolls that were chipped and hated her on sight.
    She had some dolls that were shell and still smelled of the wide, open, salty sea.
    She had some dolls that were magma that never moved, but still could glow.
    She had some dolls that were made of flesh, blood and bone.
    She had some dolls that were made of nothing and were only in her mind.

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls who fell in love with color,
    Who saw childhood birthday confetti and urban murals of graffiti the same way.
    She had some dolls who wore their sadness in being forgotten.
    She had some dolls who traced families into the past on their maps of blood.
    She had some dolls who cried stained-glass tears.
    She had some dolls who pulsed with hearts she’d broken and forgotten to give back.
    She had some dolls who loved laughter and rivers of sighs.
    She had some dolls who hid suicide pills.
    She had some dolls who wrote letters but never sent them.
    She had some dolls who were full of regrets.

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls that sighed dust.
    She had some dolls that she knew she couldn’t leave behind.
    She had some dolls that cried in her arms.
    She had some dolls that hit her until she was afraid of herself.
    She had some dolls that said they weren’t afraid.
    She had some dolls that lied.

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls that had no names.
    She had some dolls that had secret names.
    She had some dolls that had books of names.
    She had some dolls that had names like “Hope.”
    She had some dolls that had been forgotten.
    She had some dolls that had been presents.
    She had some dolls that had been broken.
    She had some dolls that had been stolen.
    She had some dolls that believed only in destruction.
    She had some dolls that awaited their own resurrection.

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls that tried to reason.
    She had some dolls that tried to teach her to fly.
    She had some dolls that tried to find love in a coal mine.
    She had some dolls that tried to save her, but could only sit
    And watch from the shelf as he raped her.
    She had some dolls that tried to fight.
    She had some dolls that tried to hide.

    She had some dolls.

    She had some dolls that feared her.
    She had some dolls that loved her.
    She had some dolls that hated her.

    These were the same dolls.


    II. One by One

    There are others, too.
    Those who moan like oceans.
    Those who loved her, who screamed.
    Those who entered through her heart.
    Those who tickled her mind with insanity.

    Those who were sugar glass
    And would break too easily,
    Glued back together
    In the shape of a heart.

    She was glued back together wrong - the smile is broken.

    She is now what she has always been -
    Incomplete as a story with no beginning.

    Maybe
    this is your kind of beginning to work with.
    this is the shedding of a second skin.
    this is the time to break our hearts
    just so we can repair them,
    and we'll do it right this time.

    One by one,
    Those ice bodies gallop
    Into the flame.

    A smile, a sigh.
    For dolls cannot speak,
    They can only hold her
    And let her speak for them.


    III. Drowning

    She says she is going to kill herself,
    And I am a thousand miles away,
    Listening to her, that rushing beast of night,
    The broken sky. She cracked like an egg
    When they came crying to her.
    I am already familiar with the story,
    Nearly sundown and there is still only gray,
    Night air approaches, the sighing other-life.

    A restaurant won’t serve her because
    She has dark skin and wears a scarf over her hair,
    And in their tight, thin-lipped laughter,
    She hears hate. She is praying,
    And while she hears Allah say, “Wait, you will see”
    She is waiting and not seeing.
    Sipping grief as a runner drinks the air,
    Her escape is my own.

    An explosion on the horizon,
    She clings to her dolls, and I am just
    Another face in the mirror behind her,
    Breathing across the distance to her.
    She breaks free, and I am so far away.

    Perhaps silence, though golden, is deadly.

    No sound.
    No sound.


    IV. Somersault

    These are the ones who wish for nothing more
    Than to escape, after the pain has turned inward;
    These are the most dangerous ones.

    They are somersaulting to suicide
    Of a different kind—a kind where
    They are not the only ones to hurt.

    One of them was a young woman who screamed
    That she was the only one.
    She was the one who loved you,
    Who held you so close that you became a part of her world,

    Her beaten heart. She is hanging from a window,
    Ninety-two stories high, as the world burns around her.
    Even the birds are silent. their fluttering wings.
    They are afraid, but they could be her waiting halo,
    Or a storm of glass waiting to crush her.

    She thought she would be set free.
    She can choose now—
    Fall from the 92nd floor and die for herself,
    Or climb back up and claim herself again,
    Even knowing it is all for nothing in the end.
    The real choice isn’t hers—give up her life, or have it stolen.

    Either way, the world won’t raise a finger
    To her fate.

    I heard the world cracking.
    People somersault into the gaps,
    Be it their choice or not—

    I hear her screaming.
    With neither a logical nor a beautiful conclusion,
    Everything draws to a close, and her heart breaks
    Before it can speak.
    I still hear her screaming.
    It won’t be real tomorrow.
    But it isn’t a nightmare—
    It is a beginning. A new era dawns,
    Exploding from the violent earth.
    We will destroy each other.

    A new woman stands, a stranger to the world
    She was so sure she knew. She wants the little girl back.
    She wants to find comfort again in the silence.
    But in the silence she finds no peace—all she hears
    Are the screams. Ashes rattling in her lungs,
    A dawning nightmare breaks over the new horizon,
    And she dives into the wreckage headfirst,
    A mere pawn in their twisted games.


    VI. Nightmare

    My nightmare of steel and sorrow
    Exploded onto the skyline of New York City.
    Three thousand stories of ash-reduced hearts
    And skeletons of cinder…why?

    Three thousand seconds of stillness and silence
    And they will never return home to eat dinner again.

    Three thousand faces that will never smile
    Upon their children again.

    People think there are reasons for everything.

    Maybe
    the explosion was the birth
    of a new era, one where our dictator
    is fear.

    Maybe
    there is a new kind of person being born
    somewhere in the universe, creation
    of some alien divinity, and when we see them
    we will laugh because they have skin that’s a different color
    and they speak only their own language
    and they pray only to their own God.

    Maybe
    the Earth is cracking open and letting us fall through,
    so that maybe we will learn to stand up again.

    Maybe
    it was the question of our sins forgotten.

    But maybe that explosion was the violent lullaby
    Too many were sung as children.
    This song tells them to hate, and to grow up holding a gun
    Instead of loving a doll. The lullaby of a crazy, molten heart

    And we fight for it, we lose, we drag ourselves across minefields for it,
    We fall in love with the insanity and pain, and scream as we find
    We have lost everything again.

    And then in the silence, the drowned, the burned, the broken
    Speak to us in their voices of silence, those who remember it
    As we never let ourselves forget, no hate but in fear:

    then
    into the madness of war. Dank fields of blood-soaked earth,
    no sound, no sound, not in words but the last echo of the fall.

    then
    into the Memorial to sweep away the knived faces of hatred.

    then
    into tomorrow, where they refuse to fall in love
    and instead wait for the rain to wash away the day before

    then
    into reflections of the world where were fearless.

    —all gone! And some will never see it again.

    Maybe…but I know.

    I was there, cowering under my bed with my dolls whispering to me.
    I was there, watching the smoke rise from the ashes.
    I was there, a place I never meant to be.

    If it is all I do in life, I swear to do it—
    to wake up one day unafraid.

    But some of us have already woken up, their bodies of sleeping volcanoes
    rocked awake, until they see past their bodies
    past the magma of their blood, into the burning of their white-hot souls

    and they will see past different minds

    to see what we have become.