YOU'RE 10, AND YOU WANT TO GET RID OF YOUR BARBIE

You start with drowning
but she won’t sink -
her blue painted eyes
smile knowingly
as you submerge
her thin frame in the ocean
of your blue childhood bathtub
but she floats back to you
returning, defiantly yours.

She doesn’t die 
when you put her
in the microwave– 
even as her plastic legs burn.
The timer rings;
you scrape her out,
still in tact.
There’s no explosion
like you’d hoped,
no combustible parts.

You eventually
decapitate her -
girls always do.
You chop off her hair,
pull off her legs.
Even then -
even headless, legless
all her doll parts
floating, bobbing -
still

She stays afloat
incapable
of a complete death,
a kind of decaptitated Ophelia,
bluest eyes.





Amy Schreibman Walter is an American poet living in London. A recent Visiting Writer at the The American Academy of Rome, Amy is a co-editor of the poetry magazine here/there:poetry.