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Posts Tagged ‘hair’

Olfactory 

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 14, 2026| 2 Comments »


 
 
“The airport smells like ammonia,” says Karen
as we sit and wait for our plane. It does. Sharp. 
Stinging. She’s off to Minnesota, I’m off to New York, 
 
and as we catch up about children and jobs, 
I take a limbic trip to my childhood home, and I’m nine
and my hair is wrapped tight around thin,
 
pink plastic curlers. We’re in the upstairs
bathroom with little flowers in the wallpaper,
and my grandmother is squirting 
 
something stinky and cold on my scalp,
dousing me in the terrible smell.
She tops me off with a white shower cap and
 
admonishes me to be patient. Though perhaps
I was still, I was not patient. Staring at myself
in the bathroom mirror, I wanted to be beautiful.
 
I wanted to be treated like a grown up. I wanted 
to please my grandmother. After processing, 
after neutralizing, after the curlers came out,
 
and after the final wash, I did not feel beautiful. 
Or grown up. But I did feel, at least for that moment, 
cared for by a woman who was seldom warm. 
 
Almost fifty years later, I recognize the perm 
for what it was, a four-hour hug. And there, 
next to gate 3A, I smell it so strong, her love.  

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Still Swimming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 4, 2020| 2 Comments »

 

 

 

And so I pull the purple comb

through my son’s thick hair,

the same way I’ve seen

the stylists do at Great Clips.

Wet the hair. Comb it through.

Part it. Hold it between

two fingers. Cut vertically. Snip,

and his hair falls to the floor.

Comb it through. Snip. Snip.

 

We both know that I

have no clue what I’m doing.

So we laugh as the hair

piles up on the floor.

We chatter, the way

a stylist and customer would,

talking of school and his friends

and his unruly cowlicks. Snip.

 

I remember that time

I was trapped underwater

by the river’s hydraulics,

how I stared up at the light

shining through the surface

and thought, I don’t think

it’s my time yet to die.

And the river spit me out

and I swam hard as I could

through the rapid toward shore.

 

I don’t think it’s my time yet

to die. Nor my son’s. Though

all around us the news of dying—

the numbers increasing every day,

stories of beloveds who are gone.

 

We ask ourselves, how do we

go on? And meanwhile, we do.

We go on. And because my son’s hair

is too long for his taste,

I learn how to cut it by cutting it.

How much more will we learn

as this goes on? How to share?

How to grieve? How to let go? How to live?

 

And meanwhile, life spits us out

into sunlight, and we come up

spluttering, gasping, surprised

we’re alive, and we swim, what a gift

to find we’re still swimming.

 

 

 

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As the Chemo Begins

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2019| 5 Comments »

 

 

 

Most of her hair was gone already,

but I guided the electric razor across her scalp,

brown tufts falling into my fingers.

 

We listened to music, drank wine,

toasted to vulnerability. She made jokes

about not needing to buy shampoo.

 

I sang along with the songs we had chosen—

choked on the lyrics to “Life is Wonderful,”

hummed when I couldn’t sing.

 

There are days when wonderful

is so far from what we might have chosen,

but wonderful it was, my hands

 

smoothing across the new naked landscape

of her head, delighting in the feel of the fuzz,

marveling at the gift of sharing loss and fear.

 

There are days when we lean into each other

and cry. And such a terrible wonderful it is,

letting the tears come. Weeping them together.

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While Reading the Labels on Shampoo Bottles Containing Guar Hydroxypropyltrimonium Chloride, • Dimethicone, and Quaternium 80, I Realize

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 4, 2017| 3 Comments »

 

the only multisyllabic ingredients

I want in my hair

are your libidinous,

prurient, benevolent

ravenous hands 

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