ERIN JIN MEI O'MALLEY
After My Mother Shaves My Head for the First Time
She tries to run
her fingers through the memory
of the hair above my neck,
but my head has already become
the animal we forget in winter,
an absence. Years of beauty orphaned
by the razor in her hand. She says
all of your hair is gone
as if gone isn’t a place, too. She kills the clippers’ hum
and looks at her hands, the mess I’ve made
of everything she’s given me: my childhood
of morning benedictions. Her burying
the teeth of a comb in my hair
while praying to a man she believes
to be her father as much as my own,
although I am related to neither
my mother nor her god.
She tells me to go
find a broom.
I pick up the stray
needles of hair from the floor
in fistfuls, but we are too clean-cut
for family fights. I’ve never looked
like my mother,
but the least I could’ve done for her
was look like someone else’s daughter.
But isn’t this all I’ve ever wanted—for the curtain
of my hair to fall to the ground like night,
the small planet of my scalp
gleaming toward someday
looking like myself? To be my mother’s blood-
less child, endangered by my
own kin and still the offspring
that outlives another knife’s dull edge--
for me to survive her
holding the blade to my neck?
223 The Paris-American
She tries to run
her fingers through the memory
of the hair above my neck,
but my head has already become
the animal we forget in winter,
an absence. Years of beauty orphaned
by the razor in her hand. She says
all of your hair is gone
as if gone isn’t a place, too. She kills the clippers’ hum
and looks at her hands, the mess I’ve made
of everything she’s given me: my childhood
of morning benedictions. Her burying
the teeth of a comb in my hair
while praying to a man she believes
to be her father as much as my own,
although I am related to neither
my mother nor her god.
She tells me to go
find a broom.
I pick up the stray
needles of hair from the floor
in fistfuls, but we are too clean-cut
for family fights. I’ve never looked
like my mother,
but the least I could’ve done for her
was look like someone else’s daughter.
But isn’t this all I’ve ever wanted—for the curtain
of my hair to fall to the ground like night,
the small planet of my scalp
gleaming toward someday
looking like myself? To be my mother’s blood-
less child, endangered by my
own kin and still the offspring
that outlives another knife’s dull edge--
for me to survive her
holding the blade to my neck?
223 The Paris-American
