Doll's eyes

(Content Warning: Descriptions of injuries, allusions to
intimate partner violence)

I

Seven. She discovers the mastiff’s violence 
on Dottie’s fallen head—glass eyes sliding 

into tilted sockets, her anguish simmering 
when she weaves a lattice of fresh stitches,

looping them through the tubular neck
into the cotton mound of the doll’s chest. 

But the scaffolding fails and Dottie dangles, 
decapitated again—dark curls, vinyl throat 

florid from the ambush of teeth and claws—
irises frosted with the memory of mauling.

II

Twenty-seven. She convulses and comes to
on the marble floor. Salt torches the fjords

in her lips as her left eye twitches and throbs, 
an oozing plum—her pupils growing grey

with fear trapped in Dottie’s tumbled resins. 
She recalls a haze of whiskey, wildflowers, 

flying arcs of frenzied fists, welts seared 
on the pelt of her neck as starlings crowd 

her windpipe—cold silhouettes of keyed dolls, 
denied justice—marionettes in a godless night.