​Dead Doll Face

by Melissa Gill

​My heavy head leans forward
Pressing against a plastic screen
Trapped in a collector’s box 
Dead glass eyes, a silent scream      
Scratching the back of my porcelain skull

Thoughts bending in the light
Shadows catch me slipping in the night
My snowy skin reddens caressed 
By a Holy Reaper’s breath
Chilling me into a block of ice

I appear like I could be alive
The way a mortuary beautician
Studies pictures of me to find 
Quiet details I left behind

The art of my uneven eyeliner
My left wing thicker than my right
She paints showgirl lips on my overbite
Masking my downward mouth

I remind her of a weeping clown left in the dust
Her circus brothers left behind to rust
Dressed in layers of glee, a story the world failed to see

Inside her heart, a wilting joy molded
Buried underneath the bones of a splitting cypress
Molting away the colors of a Summer trauma

A naked sadness choking her to tears
She imagines me riding off into Heaven’s Gates

Touched by the damp breath of dawn, I lie motionless in her arms

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Melissa Gill is a writer born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada.