Playing with dolls
Julia Balén
She is cooing at the one
with eyelids that close.
“Youuuu, so cute!”
Smiling broadly
her thin, stiffened fingers
slowly straighten
the hem of the doll’s blouse
the way she had so often
with her children,
her grandchildren.
Readying them all for bed
I place the blankie over
the one with the pink and
yellow flannel playsuit
next to the teddy bear,
before tucking my mother in
beside them,
grateful it is love
she most recalls.
As I kiss her goodnight,
she looks suddenly serious.
“I danced all across the world,
but you have to keep
the sin in the apple,”
my mother warns.
Her mother believed
that to spare the rod
was a sin
insisting her children
choose
the stick that would
whip the devil
out of them.
Surrounded by
more dolls
than her childhood
ever knew,
it seems the sin
hidden in the apple
haunts her still.
She is cooing at the one
with eyelids that close.
“Youuuu, so cute!”
Smiling broadly
her thin, stiffened fingers
slowly straighten
the hem of the doll’s blouse
the way she had so often
with her children,
her grandchildren.
Readying them all for bed
I place the blankie over
the one with the pink and
yellow flannel playsuit
next to the teddy bear,
before tucking my mother in
beside them,
grateful it is love
she most recalls.
As I kiss her goodnight,
she looks suddenly serious.
“I danced all across the world,
but you have to keep
the sin in the apple,”
my mother warns.
Her mother believed
that to spare the rod
was a sin
insisting her children
choose
the stick that would
whip the devil
out of them.
Surrounded by
more dolls
than her childhood
ever knew,
it seems the sin
hidden in the apple
haunts her still.
About the author
Associate Professor and Faculty Director of the Center for Multicultural Engagement at California State University Channel Islands, Julia Balén has a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies with a focus on issues of embodiment and power relations and has published on feminist, lesbian, and queer theory and practice in an anti-racist/classist context. Some representative publications include: “Erotics, Agency, and Social Movement: Communities of Sexuality and Musicality in LGBT Choruses” in The Queer Community: Continuing the Struggle for Social Justice, ed. Richard G. Johnson III, (San Diego, CA: Birkdale Publishers, 2009) and “Practicing What We Teach” in Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.