Scissors tilted at an angle. Snip. Snip. Snip-snip. One snip close to the woman’s right eye. If her father or grandfather were living and she were eleven, she could mail them each a large envelope of hair and they’d send a dollar back to her. Short hair equals money. Long hair equals slut.

an email
from a college boyfriend
condenses
forty years in two paragraphs
I write an obituary for romance

The stocky 60-something stylist leans over the two-tone hair part saying, A touch of color would lift your look a bit, Hon. New fall colors: Ulcerated Imagination, Midnight Angst, Ga-Ga Black, Pyramid Robber. Don’t they sound just yummy? To—die—for.

In the back room, she starts mixing a bowl of dark liquid with fondness as if from an old cookbook of beauty secrets in reverse, things undone. The smell of ammonia creeps, fog on the windows.

eyes
go viral in facing mirrors
toward infinity
again I scrub that guy
outta my hair

A stylist who says yummy has ulterior motives. Bottles of beauty product lean forward from the glass shelves like dreaded secrets sliding off a delighted tongue. The customer yanks off the bib. Holds her finger to her own head like a gun and says, My hair is as it should be—cheveux gris. Let my gray show. She walks out the door.

wet hair
getting wetter
rivulets
of black dye under
a bridge of moonlight

Jari Thymian’s

poetry has appeared in tinywords, The Pedestal, FRiGG, The Furious Gazelle, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Skylark, Thema, Prune Juice, The Bamboo Hut, Matrix, and American Tanka. Her poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize. She volunteers year-round in state and national parks in the USA.

www.jarithymian.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ 97 Degrees, Old Mesilla, NM, a triptych in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts (23 March 2015)

⚡ Laughing at Number Two in The Moon Magazine (January 2015); includes two other poems, “All the Moon’s Phases” and “Ode to the London Sewer Flusher”

⚡ You Don’t Know Shit: An Interview with Joe Jenkins in The Moon Magazine (January 2015); Jenkins is the author of The Humanure Handbook, originally published in 1995 and now in its third edition.