Lesbian Barbie

by Dustin Brookshire

–After Denise Duhamel

Tossed in the toy box,
plastic body to plastic body
with all the other Barbies,
she’s horrified, when her arm 
that was left reaching for the sky 
is now up Christmas Barbie’s ball gown.
(She respects consent.)   

People think she’s good
with power tools, 
could build a deck 
or add a room 
to the Barbie Dreamhouse,
but she’s never held a drill. 
(She can’t!) 

Lesbian Barbie is envious  
of Made to Move Baseball Player Barbie’s 
22 joints—some in the neck, 
wrists, torso, and hips—
that allow for, as Mattel says,
lots of flexibility and an incredible
range of movement.  She knows
with joints she’d be a player, 
hopes to join Mattel’s baseball team, 
at least one Baseball Player Barbie
has to be a lesbian too.

---

Dustin Brookshire is the curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series and founder/editor of Limp Wrist.  He is the author of two chapbooks:  Love Most of You Too ( forthcoming from Harbor Editions in 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). 

Rebecca Pyle’s artwork appears in Hawai’i Review, Tayo Magazine, New England Review, The Menteur, Alexandria Quarterly, The HitchLit Review, JuxtaProse, Oxford Magazine, and in many other journals and reviews, sometimes on their covers. She’s a published writer, too, of poetry, essays, fiction. Rebecca lives now in Utah.