HER BODY NOW A DOLL
By Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
(a broken sestina)
The city throbs neon from the edges of the orchard.
On the third floor upon the windowsill, a doll
perched atop the house like a raven is the attic.
These are the spaces we haunt.
But don’t forget the cellar,
Between the living and the dead, a dank veil.
At the pulpit the bride awaits her unveiling,
Inside her heart an orchard,
between her legs a cellar.
She is a house in which to put your dolls.
To be a mother is to be haunted.
Her dreams now ghost the attic.
When we were girls we’d climb into the attic,
spun spider webs into white wedding veils.
We crept into the walls to practice haunting.
Before we plucked the spoils from the bruises in the orchard.
And learned how to be a doll.
We stayed far away from those cellar-doors.
Granny’s mind is on the cellar:
She knows we girls are in the attic.
From mandrake root she fashions dolls,
poppets to protect us from the evils of the veil,
from the apples hanging in the orchard,
fruit that taunts us most in this haunt.
The playground, the diner, hometown haunts.
Don’t talk about the underworld in the cellar.
Eden was just another orchard.
Mad women collect a coven in the attic.
The trunk a casket for all those wedding veils,
standing guard a dressmaker’s doll.
For him she got all dolled-up,
Her flesh a house for him to haunt,
he snatched away that bridal veil.
Torn lace in his hand, she scrambled down into the cellar,
and through the trapdoor there and back into the attic,
back to Bertha, belly bursting full of apple from that orchard.
The crocheted cream of veil tattered in the fingers of the orchard.
She chooses a rope to haunt coiled from the rafters of an attic
Her body now a doll suspended high above the cellar-floor.