to hell with work. I want to live like Barbie

emilio guballa

to hell with work. i deserve to live like Barbie

In the dream house I kill every man who’s ever touched me. In the vacation house I settle for the women who didn’t care to. I will be every synonym of beautiful and hear about it ‘til the spit melts off the fingerprints on the paint on my skin.

I will live as kings and emperors once did, but call myself princess to candy my tyranny. Some days I traffic pocket-sized Pollys and little ponies that used to be mine to Russia. Others, my hair is cut, unsexed with scissors made for noses. Some nights I unrape myself on the benign nub of a Ken I’ve undressed accordingly. The rest, I put on tulle dresses and sit on bathroom sinks.

Since when has pink not been a man’s color? Pink for pigs to butcher with Japanese steel Pink for salmon innards caught on hooks Pink as dog cocks on hot granite Pink as babies sewn deep inside pink swollen women; the first women we make playsets out of. Each woman after turns your pink a redder shade.

In a doll’s house you could gorge yourself and remain a figure plastic-fed. Any bad memory is fictioned away

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as a rogue microplastic stuck in your head. A drop of acetone in the face and all expression’s gone. Eyes unseeing, brows unbarbed, your chemical mouth becomes a wound healed.

Your heart is only what a child can project — You would flood the world with solvent to swim that far back, to before they filled your cast with you. Before the thing that you became became you, now cast in resin.

We all aspire to this.

A life printed in neon vinyl and adult child’s play. To know the shores burn to make more you, to imagine forests bled in the name of your pretty. My ego fed to and by the same gaze, a bear trap challenge, my red hands iron-cast in a velvet pink glove.

I make a silent petition where others pray, both of us selfish: ‘My life will be beautiful, or at the least everyone else’s will never be.’ I will be blood-sated and blonde in Malibu. Or else the markers, the kitchen lighter, and the scissors can unmake me. The trees are lucky I stand 11 inches.

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