Toy

By Jack Joseph Smith

The burned baby on the wooden bed This nineteen year old whore Covering herself with the same dark blue quilt that drapped the springs Stretching the cover of the cloth, so there would be no horror, or care I asked her for her tits, but she said I can't The sex was nothing, bottomless and empty But the unusual beauty, the outward strength, and deep sorrow of her face stay the same She actually told me to turn my head, while she went to get her wrap Some teen aged black fox, be telling you that when there could be things better now I stood up off the bed waiting for Toy to come back She was sick, I heard her in the bathroom and worried Then we stood there adressing one another Saying things like thanks and how ya doing, and I would love you any time like any other person. And then I asked her what was wrong and she told me about the fire and she was then a very intelligent child Would I marry her yes as she took off her gown Earth and God she was devistating I left with her, seeing the crooked lines of her flesh.

Original Scan

Page 4

AI Interpretation

GPT

An uneasy encounter poem in which desire, pity, and damage are inseparable, making intimacy feel exposed and ethically unstable.

Claude

The poem refuses every available comfort: the burned baby, the nineteen-year-old, the dark blue quilt stretched to hide horror — each detail makes the scene more ethically unbearable. The speaker's blunt request ('I asked her for her tits') is not bravado but a kind of terrible honesty, naming exactly what desire looks like when it enters a room already full of damage.

The title 'Toy' hovers over the poem without settling on a single referent — it could name the speaker's desire, the woman's role, or the baby's condition. That ambiguity is the poem's moral center: in this scene, everyone is being used.