Barbie Gets a Migraine

            —after Denise Duhamel’s Kinky

You’d think Barbie wouldn’t suffer,

her hormones always in perfect plastic balance

without taking The Pill straight through.

She laps dark chocolate and a Willamette Valley pinot noir

as if there’s no tomorrow, as if there were no yesterday.

Her pretty lips don’t move a whit when she consumes.

The barometric pressure drop has no effect on her,

the bad weather unable to raise hairs on her arms.

Her stomach is unwilling to be queasy.

She has no knots in her smooth, creamy shoulders.

You’d think Barbie just wouldn’t—just couldn’t—succumb,

what with so much life to live in her Dream House.

But Barbie doesn’t sleep.

Her eyes are too beautiful to shut.

And the nonstop fun gets to her because

it’s not nonstop after all. The Camper

runs out of gas on the shag carpet,

and the fold-out tent won’t stay put.

Another day, her Friend Ship lands, and she’s lost

the half of it. The lulls

in life—the days between things to do,

when redheaded Casey is reading a book,

those weeks when Barbie is not an astronaut

or running for President or being Cher—

knock her head right off her neck with a crack.

Luckily, Barbie’s head pops off only after the fun is over.

But when that happens, the rubbery smell of her own skin

sickens her. Her scalp tingles and tightens

until she thinks her hair might fall out,

which, in this weak moment, offers relief.

She downs an Imitrex and two aspirin.

She takes to her pink bed. She lies still in the dark.

She pulls herself together as best she can with a snap

of her head back atop her spine.

She doesn’t deserve this—of all people, not her—

but here it is, all she can think about:

pain in her neck and behind her eyes, the deepest

understanding she will ever have of her otherwise unflawed

body where her soul was randomly cast,

just like the rest of us, just like anybody else.