Every month she buys magazines of haute couture,
takes them home to Washington Heights,
and clips out models. It is not their color,
my 22-year-old girlfriend contests, it’s how well
their bodies display clothes. A point, she makes it
to tell me about this white woman’s nose, she likes
this white woman’s lips, another’s eyes, white
cheekbones she saves in piles on the floor, in files
on the bookshelf, these faces, from their bodies,
snapshot and stored beneath her bed.
A trunk, she pulls out, of three hundred Barbie dolls.
Takes the lid off a collection, white and naked, jostles
like sugar cane cut foot-long, stretched out side by side,
each head at the feet of her neighbor, face up, smiling.
All these plastic bodies have names: Sarah, Cora, Theresa,
Jane. . . . To my face, she puts two, close, pale and thin,
smells like condensed milk—The hairline, she says,
is what makes them really distinct.
She tells me how they came into her possession.
In plastic containers she places their accessories,
of the time when she saw them on the shelf.
She explains how she makes their outfits. She always
buys another when she passes a toy store—
between breasts and thighs her fingers go.
Wipes their lips, a new color she branded, the browner
version of eyebrows to their forehead. She arranges
her dolls back in rows, piles on Barbie piles, no space is wasted.
Twist-ties their wrists and legs, so when she puts on the cover,
they won’t kick and their hands won’t raise.