Braided

My hair is long. I am 52 years old and my hair is long. My mother is dead.
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I am a pixie child. My mother calls me babydoll, honey babe, Lady Jane, Esmerelda Peabody Jones.
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My hair forms nests in the shower drain. The water floods over my toes, up toward the ankle bones that made it impossible to buy red patent leather Mary Janes.
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September is short bang month. It's also buy one new outfit for school so I won't feel bad about wearing hand-me-downs month.
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When I re-cover the basement step stool with new vinyl I find stashes of hair in every seam – almost-blonde, almost-black, and little stubbles of gray.
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In the Polaroid, I'm wearing a royal blue and white striped sweater and red plaid pants. My eyes match the sweater – my fever, the pants. I'm also angry because my doll has black curly hair and my bangs are tooshort again and it's only December.
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My hair is long. How do I keep from swallowing it while I walk in the wind, bow my head to soup, take my lover in my mouth?
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My mother is dying. I cut her hair one last time. She sits on the basement stepstool in the side yard of the house I bought for us that I will lose in a year's time. The wiry gray has migrated from her head to mine. In its place is her mother's soft white.








I tried to comment on my own post, but it wasn't working, so here are my thoughts:

I have a piece I started writing before class officially started that is longer, but less complete. I don't typically like to submit unfinished drafts to workshop, but I suppose this class is more like a fiction or CNF workshop.

It's a similar theme to "The Human Hymen (Disambiguation)", so I wasn't sure if I should submit it.

After seeing Loryn-Marie's draft, I'm wondering if I should have used my longer piece. I guess my question is this: is the piece above a lyric essay or a poem?




Because I feel safe after reading other's posts, I'll include the first draft of my longer piece here. Perhaps that's the one I'll work with moving forward.


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I am old not old. After I peel four electrodes from my privates, insert a pencil-thin plastic applicator in one end, a bullet of deadly nightshade and opium in another, apply one cream in front, one in back, I delete my dating profile. I think I shall give up hope of ever having sex again. I try to remember the throb and the thrust, the deep satisfaction of connection and potential. But it feels like tearing, burning, and my body shuts. The memory of thrust becomes a pounding in real time, a bone-deep pain, like a crushed limb, except it's deep in my pelvis – my empty abdomen.

It's come to this. I try to be grateful I have this opportunity – to attempt to rehabilitate my broken and scarred bowels, my misbehaving bladder. I could be emptying bags instead. Ten years earlier or a hundred miles north or less talented surgeons, and I'd be more broken, most certainly more despondent.

It's not so much the absence of sex. It's the constant effort. The pain is even bearable most days. It's the feeling as if no one could possibly understand. And no one wants to hear it. Except maybe the physical therapist who is gentle not gentle. She's seen and helped more despondent bodies than yours.

You feel you've become friends over the last ten years – the on-again cycle of annual insurance renewals. But could never be friends in real life. Screw the medical ethics. You're not sure you could sit across the dinner table from someone who's had her fingers in places no intimate partner has ever been. The person who seems to know every pull and twist of your “tortuous colon,” who can locate exactly the descending bend of your sigmoid that makes you crawl into yourself with the stabs of many knives, who taught you how palpate your fingers along the fullness of your unemptied ascending colon, from your cecum to the bend into the transverse and down around the descending corner, another beneficiary of your overused TENS. I sing the Body Electric indeed.

But you still find the time to be grateful, even though it's so FUCKING lonely and hard. You know others who are lonelier and even more broken who have far less hope than you do, far fewer decades left than you probably have. And you're grateful. But you're so FUCKING angry. Angry at doctors who don't get it. Angry at a body that seems to turn on you. If it's not this, it's a cancer scare, or a head injury, or a broken shoulder, an artifical toe. And you wonder what it's like to be “normal.”

You wonder if only you'd not broken up with Drew because he was too short, maybe you'd have had a normal life, pregnancies that may have stopped the mess that endometriosis made of your body. Maybe you'd have kidneys with normal pelves, a bladder that didn't spasm, bowels that emptied on their own. Maybe if you'd not gotten drunk at Hansen's birthday party, or maybe if you hadn't confided your misgivings to his gal pal he wouldn't have hooked up with her and married her instead. But you know these men who now have families, and probably grandchildren, would have eventually left your barren desert to save their dreams. It's better this way.