Poetry By Sarah Jane Gilliam

David Antis CC




What Happened With My Childhood Barbies is Between Me and the Universe

I was a yard sale Barbie girl.
Let me tell you, she’s seen some shit.
She wasn't close to “new in the box.”
She'd lost the clothes she came in,
and her shoes didn’t match.
I plucked her, along with Midge,
from a sea of ratty-haired blondes
and a pile of stuffed animals meant 
to become dog toys at the bottom 
of a stranger's wicker laundry basket.

Now, Midge was the real find–
Barbies were a dime a dozen,
but little girls didn’t part with Midge
until once they had outgrown dolls.
She was naked, her auburn hair 
matted, with little black smudge 
above her left eyebrow that 
wouldn’t come off. I didn’t care.
She was rough around the edges, but
I never wanted a doll more. 

A childhood obsession with Midge is a
lot like being in love with your best friend. 
She and Barbie didn't own swimsuits, 
soaking naked in a makeshift hot tub 
crafted from a scratched-up kitchen bowl
next to my plastic horse trailer on the deck.
They’d get out, slip into pull on-pants 
and t-shirts, then ride horses bareback 
around the porch.They shared a bed 
in an off-brand doll house, riding the 
pulley elevator up and down for fun. 

In the evenings, they played dress up 
with quarter-garage-sale-gowns, 
prancing around the play kitchen 
where they never cooked anything. 
Midge’s dress was always slipping off, 
so she wore bike shorts underneath it,
often tossing it onto the floor. 
I don’t think she was a dress girl. 

My mom dropped Ken off, uninvited and
unwanted, to their naked bathtub beach party 
one evening. He only came with swim trunks, 
otherwise shirtless, barefoot, and useless.
My mother told me that Ken and Barbie
were married and that he should live 
with her in the dollhouse instead of Midge.  
“Nah,” I told her, “Midge is way more fun.”
“He likes her,” she said, before uttering
the four words that would come to shape 
my formative years with male-centered 
world views: “Give him a chance.”

Barbie and Midge weren’t having it.
They tried locking him outside overnight, 
but he somehow survived the elements 
and the neighbor’s dogs. Burying him
in the dirt pile just off the porch proved
a fruitless effort. Someone rinsed him 
off with the garden hose and had the
audacity to lay him in the dollhouse bed.
So with “give him a chance,” as the seemingly
last-ditch effort, they invited him to their naked 
bathtub beach party. As he positioned himself
between the two of them on the edge of the 
blue-tub-beach, with Barbie’s right foot and Midge’s left,
they gently kicked him face-down into the water.

The force of the fall sent him into shock,
water seeping into the crevice where his
neck and head met, disorienting his senses.
In the distance, he thought he heard a melody,
harmonious and soothing, and as he turned
to swim towards it, the My Little Seahorse
Ponies circled, each snatching a limb as
they pulled him under. A wooden spoon
cultivated the maelstrom, the currents 
colliding while the vortex sucked him in,
separating his head from his body.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING???"

"THIS is not how girls behave."

That was the day my mom took Midge away,
glued Ken’s head back on slightly crooked,
and giving him a chance was no longer 
presented as a choice. I can’t count
how many times in the decades since 
that I’ve heard those words repeated,
instilling a deeply rooted belief
that boundaries are an after-thought, 
and a woman’s obligation is implicit.

I wish, instead, someone told me 
sooner that hyper-feminimity 
is a form of queer identity
because I’d have kissed a lot more girls.
That you don’t owe anyone a chance.
That it's okay to be a weird kid.
That you don’t have to hold
space and time for people who 
make you feel bad about yourself. 
That Hell isn’t real, and if it is, 
I’d rather be damned than play house. 
That maybe--just maybe--it's okay 
to be in love with your best friend
because Midge–she’s a fucking catch,
and she’s not going back in the basket. 

​

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Sarah Jane Gilliam is a queer, witchy Appalachian writer and English professor from the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Some of her previous and upcoming published work can be read in Jimson Weed, Still: The Journal, Suburban Witchcraft Magazine, SLANT: A Poetry Journal, Pink Panther Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand Gravel, and The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination for her short fiction piece, “The Easter Jesus” and is an editor for Mountain Movement Magazine, a publication for 21st Century Appalachia. 



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