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VOTIVE OFFERING
from Forma Issue #15
“ . . . By donating your hair you can help a cancer patient to be healed.”
A sacrifice, I thought: donate my hair. To placate her dark gods, a plait of my hair.
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A way of stretching toward her over miles— toward retching, scars, steel plate beneath dry hair.
The slow growth. The weeks of time spent hanging, flyaway, split. The strung-out state of my hair.
Long distances of talk. We curl around the knotty problem. I can’t yet braid my hair.
A year, while wisps of cirrus slough from the sky. Then everything cut short. Too late, my hair—
How thin, how worthless it looks, in its elastic in the limp plastic bag where I laid my hair.
The gods of healing never learned my name. Pointless to give it now. I hate my hair.
Previously published in Poetry Salzburg.
