Plastic Donkey – Isabelle Newson

October 18, 2025

Los Angeles in summer is a plastic donkey pretending to chew hay in a devastated yellow field. You don’t dare disclose this information but eyes catch this desolate glimpse on drives.
Voyeurs in sweltering sun:
Not like spotting a tamed horse on a vernal grass patch. A white tail only caught by your eyes in a filled car, holding its innocence to your chest as shepherds would for baby lambs.
Nor like touring your quarter-century home you’ve painted three times. Admiring the plastic bin shaking besides the dryer bursting with stamps and expired ink. Embroidered paper cutouts of dandelions, apples, and songbirds you’d swear to use for birthdays with isolated ribbon strands and torn gift wrap. Imagining hands of the you who devoted their life to giving. Thanking giving for its mark that your eyes render as wrinkled hands.
Instead it’s watching a man with a felt red cloth wipe your parents car
as you are a stagnant seven year old. Wondering if he’ll finish before the last five bites of your ice cream sandwich. You hope it’ll take three bites instead because your hands are sticky. No longer wanting white beads to rest on you like stubborn wax. Similar to the translucent sweat racing to the car cleaner’s stubble. You still whine to your mom about the heat even if an umbrella stand protects your retinas. And so your newfound consciousness understands power. Because as your eyes turn to see whatever they crave, the cleaners must stay on the car, wiping away.
Or if your wedding dress acts as a carpet for golfers at your August ceremony in Palm Desert. These secretive suitors holding your tail makes you shiver (maybe because their minds not only laud you, but also golfing). Finally turning to the starved faces upon you, you implore so silently for a pair of scissors to sever unyielding porn loving fingers from a relic to your descendants.
To strip is your only option.
Bare thighs under a dry sun makes you feel like you’re in Los Angeles
Not because of an invasively fast tan
But because you remember yourself as a plastic donkey.
Glossed eyes on pseudo hay,
Periphery out of order,
Props taunting fuel.
Your stomach can’t even grumble.
No longer relying on eyes but recounting silent sights you’ve made all your life to unforgettable mammals and your aging body. To headstrong car washers and perverted golfers. You try to recall your intentions with them all, it’s all you have as you are now banished from knowing theirs–and anyone else’s.
You turn confidants into passersby on an international road. Toll taxes to those who may
gaze upon you, or even visit, are evaded. They’ll stare at you from moving cars, helicopters, drones even, and notice how you appear unclothed.
But if anyone steps out for a sharper look, their eyes will adjust. They’ll come to the conclusion that you spent your summer existing in a naked suit.
Watched for no purpose,
Pretending
to
suffer.