This selection, chosen by guest editor john compton, is from Never Picked First for Playtime by Dustin Brookshire (Small Harbor Publishing 2023).
Limited Edition “Good Bones” Barbie
after Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”
Life isn’t short when you’re plastic.
It takes a thousand years to decompose.
Mattel tells Barbie:
Think of all the delicious ways you’ll live,
collecting centuries like charms on a bracelet.
Mattel keeps the truth from Barbie:
For every Barbie that is loved,
kept safe, passed down
generation to generation,
there is a Barbie melted
on a stove top, decapitated
by an older brother,
mauled by the family dog,
or forgotten on a playground.
Like any business seeking profit,
Mattel says what is needed
to keep the Barbie smile,
smiling: You are famous,
a name more recognizable
than Cher, Oprah, Madonna.
Millions of little girls want to be you.
They’ll grow up to be women
who keep you on a shelf,
a shrine, a deity to worship.
Mattel never discloses—
even those people
sell Barbie on eBay
when the price is right.
Dustin Brookshire’s (he/him) fourth chapbook, Repeat As Needed, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions in May 2025. A recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship awarded by Poetry at the Sea, his work has been published or is forthcoming in the Best American Poetry Blog, Pleiades, Five Points, Cherry Tree, South Florida Poetry Journal, TAB, Whale Road Review, and other journals. He’s the editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Anthologies, 2024) and the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). Dustin curates and hosts the Wild & Precious Life Series. He lives in Asheville with his partner and cat Jude Paw. More at dustinbrookshire.com. 
john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs, cats and mice. his latest full length book is my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his latest chapbook is melancholy arcadia published with Harbor Editions (april 2024).
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