i always end up writing about hair.

I.

because you believe in
the learning curve of hairstyling
more than an eighty-dollar
cut-and-color,
you take the back of the box too seriously
and don’t let the bleach
touch the skin under my hair.

the girls i want to be
or be like, or be with
dye chunks of their hair blonde.
it’s supposed to look good.

but you care too much about the
health of my scalp
to let me look like a zebra.
so instead, i look like a zebra with
inch-long roots
and a mother who clearly doesn’t know
how catty eighth grade girls can be.


II.

from over the sink
the pile of auburn strands look something like
mistakes, growing growing.
i can feel the buzz of the clippers
in my jaw.

i told you i want this for myself.
that hair is my vanity
and i’d have a lot more time for
God
or plotting against you
if it was gone.

so you said i’d better keep a hat on
when i’m in your house.

but outside
the yarn of my beanie
sticks like velcro to my scalp.
and when it starts to rain
i pull the velcro off
and feel each drop as it smacks me.


III.

the dog’s body warms my feet.
your feet warm my hands
and the lamp on your nightstand
glows the room orange.

you touch your left
eyebrow, cheek, nostril, ear
to show me what you can’t
feel anymore.
then you lift the hair behind your ear
to show me where some man in Novi
will cut in to your head.

you say thank God they’re not shaving
the whole thing.
thank God.
just around the ear where the
long thin hair there
can make believe there was never
a tumor.

excerpt from a letter to the creator.

when i go to sleep, i feel like my stomach is turning slowly inside out. i close my eyes and imagine it is and think i am becoming the type of person i despise.

but with these ducks swarming around me, i'm realizing again that i do care. i do care about these ducks and i am capable of caring about the world.

maybe if i cry every bit of water from my body, it will wash me clean in the way that Jesus' blood used to. maybe faith means crying when it all seems too much and believing that the tears will come back as warm rain. maybe the way to heal is to hug my pain and tell it i am going to do everything i can to change to change you back into love.

i've spent so long believing that love is always soft. and i'm not used to love that stings more than it soothes, so i call it disruption.

graying ears.

like god,
they watch their children grown old
before they do and
lose control of their back legs almost completely.

and when their children become elderly with
graying ears and eyes filmy blue,
and refuse to
eat any food they have to chew,
and when the cancer on his hip is too far into the bone
for the surgery to make much of a difference,
the parents take away the pain
and place their children's ashes on the mantle.

on a friday night.

my mother, my friend Kara, and i stood outside the Chicago theater in october of my sophomore year of high school. it was my first time seeing ani difranco in concert, so i was shivering for several reasons.

uncomfortable with the dyed mohawks and women holding hands around us, my mother made small talk with a woman standing next to her. she appeared to be in her mid 40's, wearing a red windbreaker and toting a clipboard.

when the doors finally opened, my mother said goodbye and we climbed to the nosebleeds for our seats. as the opener finger picked on stage, my mom's hand flew up to her mouth in a gasp.“lindsay,” she said holding a pamphlet, “i think i just gave money to the communist party.”

mass.

so it turns out that crazy isn't the only thing that has been growing in my mother's head.

the powerful, ominous "they" say it's about an inch in diameter and is growing on a nerve that transmits sensation into her face.

how do i comfort the person i'm slowly becoming numb to?

how do i pray for sensation to return when i have been praying so long for thicker skin? i've forgotten what it's like to feel good with her, to feel certain of her love.

so, is my tumor operable? do i let myself feel again? is the same god who put that tumor on her brain stem big enough to take it out of me?

these are questions i should ask my doctor. but i am alone in this.

i need to feel her again.

hanging flowers.

my friends always hangs her flowers from
the tops of doorways. upside down so
the life from the stem
will drain into the colors of the petals.
and like a noose, the tape holds it there.

the air becomes cancer, drying its juices
slowly, though just slowly enough
to give it hope that
water could come somehow, that
my friend could see the cruelty of
slow, beautiful death and
instead place it right-side-up in warm sucrose water.
but flowers that die with promises of living again
wilt and dull and fall apart.

so when the air has finally sucked all
of the wet from each petal, the corpse hangs there still,
the smell of its ghost faint and
swimming around it.

crabbing.

over dinner
she talks about the shooting range
and how she sometimes aims at
targets in the shape of humans.

her husband chimes in.
their joke about swinging targets of terrorists heads
does not make me laugh.
i want to ask her if she knows
what a terrorist is.
i want to ask her how it's any different
from the bombs we drop.
i want to say
listen lady
if you think that shooting at
figures unlike your own
makes you different from people practicing
on targets that look a lot like you
you're mistaken.

but then i remember how
an hour earlier
i pulled red rocks and dungees out of the
ocean in cages and
split their bodies on the
side of a white bucket and
power washed their insides on to the grass.

and i don't say a thing but
could you pass the crab?