Super-Sized series

 Hair Disasters

 

Kitchen Hair Salon by Mary Ellen Talley

Oh! The flaws parents perpetrate!
Our son accuses me of ruining his childhood
with his straight-across bangs haircuts.
I truly didn’t use a bowl to trim our little guy
while he sat on a stool wrapped in newspaper aprons, 
but the effect was the same as I took forever
trying to make lines even, and wiped his face
of errant hairs that tickle-itched. 

Years later, when our son had graduated 
to Rudy’s Barber shop, he played Mo, straight man
with bowl-cut bangs of the slapstick Three Stooges
in the annual middle school extravaganza.
Now, as an artistic adult who cuts his own hair,
our son has warned his sister
never to let Grandma cut her sons’ hair
for it would do irreparable harm to their psyches.

Two poems by Sharon Waller Knutson

A Tornado in Toronto 

No one would have believed
it unless they saw me
stepping out of the hair salon
in the seventies 
in the Portuguese District
a cone of curls swirling
to the sky. No one
at the salon spoke English
so I had pointed to the photo 
with curls corkscrewing
around a smiling face
and cascading to her shoulders
and the hairdresser opened a bottle
of smelly solution that burned
my nostrils like the chemicals
in the college lab but not my scalp
as she slathered solution on straight
strands of hair and wound them on
paper lined curlers and then let
them set under the heat of the hair
dryer. She was smiling as she whirled
my chair around to face the mirror
but began crying as I clawed at the curls
sticking straight up towards the ceiling
trying to pull them down to rest 
on my forehead, framing my face,
but they sprung back like mattress coils.
Strangers stared, pointed and smothered
laughter. My boyfriend’s children screamed. 
No one recognized me until three weeks later
I walked out of the beauty college
with straight hair falling like silky satin
chocolate ribbons on a wedding cake,
softening my face and eliciting smiles
and praise as I was pretty again.


Weeds Sprout on my Scalp

After I am bedridden 
with back pain for days. 
My hair is dry as a haystack.

Bindweed twists and turns
at the top 
and a tumbleweed is stuck
against the back wall.

Before we get out the scissors,
we spray water but the comb
still snarls in the tangles.

So we slather on
coconut oil,
mayonnaise
and peanut butter,

and avocado,
olive oil
and apple cider vinegar.

After it marinates,
and we shampoo, 
the strands straighten
smooth to my shoulders

scented like a salad,
sandwich
and fruit bowl.







My Mother against the Wind by Judith Waller Carroll

A poem should start in Kansas and end in Oz. –Billy Collins

Because she was born in Kansas
my mother hated the wind.
Though they left when she was little,
she remembered her mother 
rounding up all ten children
and ushering them to the storm cellar
with its dank, earthy smell 
But they landed in Columbus, Montana,
where the Absaroka Mountains
funneled the high plains wind 
into our little valley,
scattering leaves as she raked them,
whipping sheets from the line. 
What she hated most
was the mess it made of her thick auburn hair. 
She would scowl at the mirror,
stubborn and determined as Dorothy 
battling witches and flying monkeys,
as she combed out each tangle and snarl.



 

CONTINUATION OF A SAGA by Lori Levy

I don’t go to the hairdresser to talk.
I go for highlights and vanity:
white paste and foil
rolled up in rings around my head.
I go for her chatter between strips of hair,
Romy’s French-Persian blend
of dreams and disasters—
a totaled car, a shop she will open.
For shampoo and Hollywood stars,
a lather of names she rubs in my scalp.
I go to listen,
to hear the continuation of her stories—
Will it be lawyers or landlords today?
Paris, or the men she has known?
I go for hair sliding to the floor with scraps
of old addictions from her rock-singer days—
AA meetings and an ex-husband
who floated higher than music.
I go for Romy and her perfumed hugs,
for her cats and her garden
and the screen play that almost made millions;
for her troubled past, the death of her parents 
and brother, for the bird with the broken wing.
I go for color and poetry
and 12-step philosophy
and all that’s there
in the swivel of my chair
in front of her mirror.



 

Two poems by Lynn White



Ray Of Sunshine 

It was my first attempt at DIY hair dying.
My friend had transformed her dull brown
into glossy chestnut and Patricia thought
it perfect to transform her unnatural blond.
So I helped her out.
Tiger Lily, it said on the packet. 
Well tigers are a chest-nutty brown,
Or so we thought.
But on a base of blond
the result was unexpected.
Could any creature,
any plant,
be quite so bright,
oranger than orange,
more fiery than fire.
And this was before the days of punk
when the colour would have been lauded 
and sort after.
Not then.
Early for the emergency hairdresser,
Patricia called into the butcher’s shop.
In spite of the warm day
she made sure that 
the hood of her duffle coat was
pulled firmly forward,
hiding what lay
beneath.
She told me later that she focused
on the large spider on the coat
of the woman in front of her
in the queue
to control her anxiety.
“Did you brush it off for her,”
I asked?
“No,” 
“It seemed quite at home there”,
she told me.
Her turn came.
and then horror!
“Here comes my little ray of sunshine,”
he smiled!
Blood and sand!
She thought he could see it.
But he was just being friendly,
like the spider.

First published in Literary Yard


Imagination’s Real 

Back in the day 
before elderly women 
preferred to become blonde,
grey turning to blue was common.
“Look at that lady there, she’s got blue hair.
Look, mummy!” he said loudly
in the Waiting Room at the Doctor's Surgery.
“I don’t like blue hair, do you!”
as she squirmed with embarrassment.

Blue was a dead give away 

of aged artifice
as, unlike blonde
natural hair can never be blue,
it doesn’t bend the light like feathers
to make that specialist refraction
of reality.

So it was a dead give away

of pretence
or fantasy, 
of unreality,
or imagination.
But sometimes that’s perfect,
perfectly fit for purpose.
“Look at the horses in that painting.
they’ve got blue hair! 
Look, mummy, look” he shouted, 
“I like their blue hair, don’t you?
It makes my imagination real!”
She laughed in agreement 
and thought there was an artist in the making.

First published in As It Ought To Be




 
Rapunzel by Laurie Byro

When  his spirit came to me from the North, spouting
nose-gays and jealousies, all those manly pursuits, I knew

I was in trouble .  Consider the words he left “make a pledge, for
mischief is nigh”.  Then consider my dilemma.  Mischief?

What bored Tower-Damsel wouldn’t want that? To some, even
his words are illegitimate.  I rave a little.  It is his words, not
vapors,

that intoxicate my senses.  Heady I become from those old taunts:
long Vowels and short A’s.  “Tarantula, monsoon, antler”:

I can bear it, if you can. Even the goats are mesmerized.
Let this be a lesson to all women and men who adore mortals

who have a way with words.  We shall grow our hair long to stuff
up our ears.  Sing: tra la, tra la.  Let their gutturals be captured

into a potion-bottle we clamp down with a cork.
Once upon a time, a lavender vowel escaped and I was left pining

in a turret.  I was left with goats and chickens that cluck and bray.
Fancy me, and my fine fashion sense; I’ve adorned

my hair with plumes.  A warning:  you mustn’t  let some randy-hoofed
mischief-man  talk you into letting your hair down

permanently.   No free man or woman wants to lose his way,
fall off the tower, take her first tumble.

From The Bloomberries