Yesteryear Fiction

Island of the Dolls
By Theresa C. Newbill


There's an island along the canals of Xochimilco,
where rain falls in rapid transit between two
worlds.

The trees are beasts fresh from risen waters, an
unworldly kind of physician that houses spirits
who walk the land with invisible swift feet.

Solace fills the cold shadows behind the scars of
a dead wind where slashes of the past, flow,
whistling demonic tunes.

Bitter roots say nothing as they exhale in the
continual twilight, sensible not to wake the souls
found rejected inside the hanging tree dolls.

Vanishing against the pillar of bark is a young
girl in white gown. Her skin's original pallor
has been lost to the bloodedness of blue

where silver and alabaster flesh falls in pieces
among kerosene lamps that burn with triangular
eminences.

Purple iridescences slick the surface ripples of the
canal as gondolas and ghosts folly together
in a chromium cross of tourists and the departed.

If you listen, you can hear Julián Santana Barrera
speak from within your soul about the calmness
of the night and the hands that stroke

the moonlight playing catch with the perishes of
time. There's a old witch that roams inside the
stanzas of these poems,

one that longs to find her way out of earth's
rondure to the grandeur of these parts where a
small child and an old caretaker

reign indulgently and freely past the glitter
of the waters and the errors of significant moments,
without articulation, without a sense of place.


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Theresa C. Newbill is a is a self described free spirit and former elementary school teacher turned writer. Her work has been widely published in various print and online magazines and she has received numerous awards for her writing.