As Soon as We Are Born We Start to Die
by Jennie Malboeuf
You said your childhood home
was emptied out and I pictured
a giant hand picking the house up
and shaking about its contents,
little startled people and all.
My favorite part of playing dolls
used to be dressing the rooms; choosing
a place for each piece of furniture:
the tiny computer with squiggly lines,
a ringaling wind-up phone, plastic
couches and paper rugs, a petting zoo
of felted flocked foxes out back.
By the time I’d get to putting on
the girl-dolls’ clothes and shoes,
dinner was on the table.
Jennie Malboeuf is a native of Kentucky. Her poems are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, PRISM, on Unsplendid, and the Bellingham Review; work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, on the Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Prize, Ruth Stone Prize, and Arts & Letters Rumi Prize. She lives in North Carolina and teaches writing at Guilford College.