Outside the Dollhouse / Proof of life

Outside the Dollhouse

In the cooling air your face cracks open
like a ceramic dish; you are insane, hungry, harmful,
the knife through the water: full of want, eluded.
For months you have not seen it, time
like discarded flesh draped through your forearms.
You begin to remember the girl with the comb, who
read of green glass hotels and deserts that housed
a resurrected Arc, no sea, and you, still breaking, still
treading water and wondering — who are we, to house
so much blood? When you bleed it is irregular, spotted, too
thin. If you pared back enough of your body you know
there’d be a marrow of meaning, somewhere, and a sparrow,
whistling, wild with want. You know your bones would swipe
the hair from your forehead with a mother’s touch.
You have no more costumes to wear. No more people
to fool. You are getting tired of fooling yourself.

Proof of life

I cannot describe it beyond carnal,
intricate, a red teapot unchipped and him leering
in the corner, incessant, mocking my capacity
to love: I’ve grown too enamored with patterned
carpets, drug-induced dreams, too stirred
by a Labrador’s short silky pelt or roadkill, red
guts spilling into the silent street. We used to knock
on each others’ doors without calling first.
Now I do not call him by name or swim
in the ocean. A mother allows her kid to sit
in the shopping cart as she pushes it outside
the local grocer, but the kid is still thrill-starved, searching
for something he will never experience, while the dogs loom
hungry outside the screened-in kitchen door, and the
mother chops up bell peppers for shakshuka, with no
onions because she cannot afford to cry, no, not right
now. When I rub my face against the Oriental
rug it
bristles soft into my cheek, almost like
the top of his head after he cropped
his hair short — the Labrador has found me, now,
he is ambling over and when he drops his lazy weight
on top of my abdomen, I find I like breathing more
because it is more difficult.

By Dylan R. Ragas

—In their column “Yard Sale Organs,” Dylan R. Ragas ’26 creates poems that attempt to make sense of a past — real, imagined, but mostly somewhere in between. They can be reached at dylan.ragas@thecrimson.com.