Poised in baldness and candor, mannequins exist glaciated while the sales associate clothes them.  

like how Mother’s glass figures of the first coming are glaciated patiently in the foyer,  

or like the wires between your teeth behind the TV when you were five—shocked to a halt.  

Oh, wash the mannequin’s hardened feet while you’re here.

Department store lights hound the associate's eyes in Morse code. 

demanding like leaves that erratically thrash on their branches toward free fall,  

though the associate doesn’t squint—hopes she, too, might turn to stone. 

All art demands to be felt, so they must be feeling. Do they mimic us and our flower-shaped heads, or are we the weeds sprouted in the lawn long after them?  

Songs of the bland and blaring assault her ears; ashen floors tap with customer furies,  

sardonic in melodies of mimicry,  

uncomfortable like evolutionist films in cathedrals or unfitting shoes. 

“Our love becomes a funeral pyre,” sing the store speakers. “C’mon baby, light my fire.” 

The associate removes a mannequin child’s arm,  

the child doesn’t cry or thrash in contempt; 

and she wraps them in a sweater with a single bloody handprint. 

“Not that sweater,” says the manager. “Choose another.”

So she selects the T-shirt with a smiley face,  

and offers them to get into it, 

her chipped fingernails caught in broken hangers. 

In the room behind the manager’s office, there are seventy more arms, legs, and heads—all biding. 

Who is to say which among them gets to be posed for the masses?  

Are they not illusions of humans, too?  

The sales associate wonders about the answers.  

The mannequins plot humanity's rapture, but they will spare you. 

A boy laughs at a naked mannequin woman the associate has yet to clothe, 

and he laughs so hard the wires between his teeth twist, 

and his face freezes all blood-red when 

The woman laughs back.