Place Settings
R. Mac Jones
The factory began shutting down,
having produced every iteration,
every possible career, convention,
history,
as off the line came
the final Barbie,
one whose tiny fused fingers
hold a marrow spoon:
a Barbie who sits to sup
on the cradle of blood
and uses that silver spoon
on the beef marrow before her,
served in pipe-cut bone,
in a pool of plastic broth,
a meal requiring a marrow spoon,
a particular silver spoon, narrow-bowled,
to slip into the hollow of the bone,
looking, itself, like a silver bone split
and hollowed, a smaller, man-made bone,
gutting marrow from its corona of bone,
removing the eclipse, what early primates
might have screamed at in awe, long before
hominids made statues in their own images.
R. Mac Jones’ work has recently appeared in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Right Hand Pointing, NonBinary Review, Eye to the Telescope, Mirror Dance, and elsewhere.