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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
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Erin Jin Mei O’Malley is a queer Asian adoptee writer who is based in New York and Arizona. An Interdisciplinary Enrichment Fellow of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Arizona State University, they have received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nashville Review, The Margins, The Shade Journal, and others. You can follow them @ebxydreambxy.

Upcoming poet:
Jessica Johnson
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