By Kristen Reece
We called it that then, retardation. We didn’t see the harm in it.
Do you know you’re harming until the harm is done?
Carmen—I remember her from when I was very little,
elementary school, maybe grade two.
She had a Cabbage Patch with a hard plastic face.
Their braids were alike, two pigtails, the doll and her each.
Children were mean. But not me. Never me.
They made a game of taking her doll, snatching it from her arms.
She would wail, warbling almost. A mother bird, an infant herself.
Her throat opened wide, waiting always for a worm.
High and then low, keening like a hawk. red faced, falling from the nest.
What people remembered was the meanness—the meanness of her reaction,
when she took it back, grabbing her doll by the feet. Still keening,
she would wind up and hit you. The kids told me it felt
like a cinder block had been dropped. One girl’s cheek fractured.
Poor Carmen, who couldn’t speak, who could not tell
what had been done to her, what had been taken from her.
Her stolen baby the only thing she had ever loved.
I watched from a distance; my inaction made
me the same as those children.
I see Carmen still, pushing her Cabbage Patch on the swing.
Spinning her on the merry-go-round, in her own little world.
I think that Carmen wished she was the doll
but the doll never once wished to be Carmen.
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