Ruth
Barbie was made by a Jewish woman,
I tell the class who doesn’t care.
The daughter of a woman from the old country
made the world’s favorite plastic gentile.
Pretty remarkable, isn’t it? In Christmas dresses
and Easter outfits inside special edition boxes,
Barbie glitters like the perfect ornament
on a child’s wish list for Santa.
With eyes like winter and hair the color
of sun, no one would guess her origins,
Or the dead language of her mother’s mother’s
tongue, lost somewhere in big city dissolution.
The leading star of holiday catalogs for decades,
Barbie was formed from the survival of a recent
war, its repetition feared. Born to places
where we haven’t always been wanted,
Barbie is not barred from country clubs, or schools
or small southern towns. Nobody would recognize her
by nose, or texture of hair, or star of David. There are
no Kiddish cups in her many wedding sets.
Our makers come from villages with blurry names
that others might laugh trying to pronounce.
Plastic and bones alike do not go easy into
the earth. I am here because someone
made the hard decision to leave the land they
loved. I don’t wash my hands of the sacrifices.
I tell the stories of our creator’s mothers and ask
that they be noted. Gift magazines aren’t
much different from a sacred scroll.
We look to them and hope for something,
for someone, for a future that could fit
in a child’s small hands
.
Danielle Shorr (she/her) is a professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing. A finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Non-fiction and nominee for The Pushcart Prize in Creative Non-Fiction and Best of the Net 2022, her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Driftwood Press, The New Orleans Review, and others. @danielleshorr
Stone Poetry Quarterly 