Cindy Childress
Across from Frederick’s of Hollywood
a fat woman sits on a stool
ready to sell brunette bobs,
grey curls,
black plaited clip-ons, and
layered blonds.
She usually reads a romance
novel.
I can never be sure that her
thick, brown hair
isn’t fake.
I want to touch it, casually
ask
to try on the red one.
Once I saw a customer there--
a dumpy woman with limp weeds
dangling from her skull.
My grandmother couldn’t fix
her hair
after the stroke that left her
right hand powerless.
She trained her left fingers
to part her hair
down the center and make two pony tails
snapping in the rubber bands.
The wig’s Styrofoam bust
watched
her routine through the
lenseless eyes.
Those coarse strands curled
under;
the stocking-like fixture sat
in place
with bobby pins on her head,
and so she avoided
helplessness.
Leslie refuses to cover her
head
now that her scalp is a bare
knuckle.
She’s saving her wig money for
a perm
when the hair grows back.
She says a woman’s glory is
not a covering,
but the beauty in what’s
underneath.
Bonnie shaved her head in
solidarity,
but I chickened out.
Preferred to walk for a cure
instead.
Preferred to stare at the wig
stand
wondering what color and
length I might choose
if I had to.
Premenstrual Craving
I am isolated
in a cluster of beach rocks
beaten to fine grains.
Starfish suffocate on my spine
each time the tide recedes.
Dunes change shape in the
wind.
Lilies wither, flourish,
wither, flourish
unaware of lava molting below
the surface
waiting for a sacrifice.
Fat calves and princes do
little to quench the thirst
to find myself in some other
body of water.
I am hungry to digest myself,
eruption burning inside and
out
in effort to rise above the
sea’s level.
unknowable
And what if Keats thought the
urn
was only a pot, after all?
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
but those words meant nothing
beyond the questionable value
of Elgin’s marbles,
a pile of homeless Roman
statues
whose sinews cut too deeply
for royal viewers,
who’d rather hold the truth of
shadows at a distance
and inhale beauty immediately.
An urn with a wordless story
needs you to give it life,
unlike the statues
that seemed to move, yet
didn’t.
Forever straining toward some
unknowable goal,
fragments of a Sysiphian race
racing toward mortality
in attempt to escape.
Who dares to look toward the
marbles, or look away?
The creative mind sees them in
visions;
in the mirror’s truth,
my body is unfinished work
that takes its own shape
beyond me--
becoming my opposite--
an unruly shadow lurching on
the wall.
And you, buried in a corner,
curiously listen as
literary types lullaby
ourselves
A false-flattering sense of
simple lines:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
As though it is the object,
not the idea
that makes a Grecian urn more
than a pot,
why just any pot is not a
Grecian urn,
why the value of a few marble
statues is of interest at all.
Colorlessness
Adam’s children went
overboard, and now
a collective hallucination
separates and redivides variations
of pigment
coordinated into rules that
govern patterns, decorations schemes,
and the names of nail polish.
A package without a label
can’t be sold,
so I want to hide transparent
in shadows
not recognized
by fathers of culture
devising our taste for color
schemes
from a distance.
We are not where we think,
and I think, therefore I am
mediated
through self defense denial
that my shadow is not my dark
side,
but my innermost secret shade.
Absence of what is the color,
gray
alludes my hand each time I
reach
to adjust her hair
turning facelessness into a
smile.
I rub elbows with nothing,
and call her God.
Written After Arguing About the Possibility
Of Finding an Exit in Existential Thought
Staircase that smells of rain,
cummulus of damp pollution.
You could be anywhere. Hand on
any metal rail
feet stepping up and up
marbled tiles
toward any floor, any door.
Each landing indicates
possibility and limit--
the certainty that you are not
any/where
but in some immediate present
like an airplane realizing its
landing pad.
Pilot, close your eyes from
the compass.
Lay a finger on the map.
Say "Now here."
The stairwell disappears,
and you become cloud
reigning the paths underfoot.
Frozen Message
Peace Rally
January 18, 2003
There are sixteen varieties of
snowflake,
and it seems that each blesses
the streets of D.C.
like the good fairies in
Sleeping Beauty.
White ballerinas dance around
our feet;
white soldiers line
attentively
in the cracks of sidewalks;
Earth waves her white flags
blanketing us with cold.
Inside the Smithsonian Museum
of Modern Art,
you warm me with a kiss that
smells of snow
beneath Warhol’s “A Boy for Meg.”
Nature pulls us to warmth even
as her freezing guards
await us outdoors, where we
march a plea
against our hands turning the
world upon itself,
an inversion unlike Winter and
her wind.
Amid the sea of bundled
bodies,
I moisten a handful of dry
flakes
chase you down Independence
Avenue
as frozen bits fall through my
leather-encased fingers.
The other hand holds my bright
sign high;
touching it to the ground
might jinx it,
like I thought as a Girl Scout
unfolding stars and stripes.
For Frida Kahlo, who painted the interior of her home yellow
The body is a strange
organism.
Grotesque and breathing
shallow in a plaster corset,
Frida hung upside down 2 hours
every day for months
hallucinating her return to
health more lovely;
to live as if she had no body
running through fields
sitting Indian-style
bending and lifting
contorting into positions
to sway Rivera from
mistresses.
“It is ironic,” she wrote,
“that I who so many times
dreamed of being a traveler
and navigator”
was confined to home
stitched together by
physicians
as if recovery were a grail
still to be found
beneath her map of scars.
32 times she taunted death
under the scalpel
as it teased her
through polio, impalement,
betrayal
betrayal, betrayal--
Buddhists say we recycle
living lives over and over,
but like the nine lives of a
cat,
Frida claimed she spent all of
hers in one go.
Her spirit kept returning
to the same hands
to paint the trap door in her
forehead--
survival justified by her
artist’s eye
that escaped the broken body
through paint brushes
to discover the colors of
imagination.
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