A DOLL FOR THROWING

Katherine Gaffney

Here is where he asks why I wanted
lavender. And here is where I give him
a list of some of my favorite words:

Periwinkle
Persimmon
Pompoms
Peplum

How do these words answer my question?
My reply was equally inquisitive: How does
skipping sidewalk cracks save your mother’s back?

With surgical curiosity I look back out
the window to see that the wind turbines
are now just girls doing cartwheels.
How that answers the question
of how many women have walked into bodies
of water never to be found, I can’t quite explain.

He says, You know, you are the glass of lemonade
in the dive bar. And it’s nice to see him
trying to meet me somewhere, as when he
instructed me to watch the wind shake
the car door like a hand.

One television show he keeps requesting
we watch uses the phrase bedsheet bingo
as though it were a universal shorthand
for casual sex, as a jar is a forgotten synopsis
of a woman.

Part of the reason the mystery of Mary’s status
at the table remains, I learn from a public
television program he doesn’t watch,
is due to an incomplete sentence —

He kissed her on the

The reason he doesn’t watch is because
he’s kissing me on the —
you can see the allure, the confusion, temptation
in filling in something other than
forehead, cheek, hand. The innocent
hanging article invites mouth and more.

What about neck? Easy, I agree.
Feet? A little harder to read, no? Eyelid.
Intimate, sure, but romantic?

It’s like a child throwing a doll. You can’t know
for sure that the child doesn’t like the doll. Perhaps
she sees this pitch as euphoric flight not disposal.
It’s possible this toss has little to do with the doll
at all—as the kiss may have little to do with Mary,
herself. As bedsheet bingo may have little to do

with bodies. An assumption of knowledge is a slip
where one may miss out on a peplum
not only being a bit of fabric flaring
from a woman’s waist, but also a genre of Italian film
based on biblical epics, commonly known
as Sword-and-Sandal. It is also interesting to note:
these films were replaced by the fad of the Spaghetti Western.

Now we must also circle back to assumption,
which, in the above, has a clear meaning.
Let’s not forget that it is also the reception
of the Virgin Mary bodily into heaven. Remember
this is not the same Mary as before. That other
Mary, it is argued, is a historical composite
of multiple Marys. So you can see how the kiss
may have had nothing to do with Mary, herself.
For it is arguably hard to find Mary, a self.

My question, here, is who met this Mary bodily?
Was she kissed? Is this the answer to my earlier
question regarding women and water? Is a jar
a mere reduction of an organ? Or to remind us
that a woman once washed a man’s feet?
I would do so with kisses, I say. He meets me
again with a hand on my thigh —
an assumption of its own.

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.