Pregnancy Doll
On the farmhouse carpet was a doll.
The doll wore a fluff of blond hair, a blue smock.
Pregnancy Doll, we called her.
To play with the doll, we pressed
the stethoscope to her chest,
listened to her heart. Prepping
her with pretend ointment
to reveal the grainy portrait of baby.
Then we pried the lid of her belly
until it snapped loose like the bed
of a truck. My uncle tells a story
about hauling dolls to the dump.
Black plastic splitting, spill of limbs
and heads tumbling bright-eyed
in the dark. Next, we reached inside
her to remove the baby.
How often I am struck by the fact
of myself. A wind shakes the nest
from the old oak. More than once,
I dreamed that my body was a room
readied to be moved into,
only the tenant brought all the wrong
stuff. I have always been afraid
of being looked into. It never matters
what they are trying to take out.
In Nebraska, snow falls,
then thaws, then falls again.
I finger a pink bowl, a plastic womb.
Beneath that oak: Bits of shell
still cling to yolk. At ten, A and I
rode in the back of her dad’s pickup.
Facedown, hiding from cops: palms flat
to the metal, like we’d been shot.
Years ago, I lost the doll: stethoscope,
sonogram, baby, the works.
Now, someone teases my hair
platinum, I wake up blue.
The nurse stirs the sample of me
into a tube. I only dress
when I’m told to.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Mother Tongues, winner of The Cupboard’s chapbook contest. Ghostlit, a collection of poems, is forthcoming in February 2025. Her work has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Alumni Association (University of Alabama), and Inprint (Houston, Texas). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Short Fiction (England), Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in Kearney, Nebraska, where she teaches creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
