WHEN I LOOK LIKE MY FATHER IT MAKES MY MOTHER CRY................................LORRAINE RICE

When I Look Like My Father It Makes My Mother Cry

Poem by Lorraine Rice

I give up on wrestling my hair into a limp, submissive, dead-straight existence, tell my mother—Just cut it all off, trying to get back to the beginning, in the straight-backed chair waiting for my mother who’d been the one to fix my hair, wanting her to see it never was broken. Feet bare, sweat-stuck to newspaper spread under the chair— how many times, how many, have I watched her cut my father’s hair? Him in the same chair, a frayed towel-cape over shoulders and chest, his ankles an X on the spot where Dagwood blows his top over Blondie’s new hat. Her over him, cheeks caved in, brow ridged, the concentration of years on her face, sharp metal shears in hand. My parents always uneasy sharing space and seeing them close is bewitching and bewildering— their fragile intimacy severed by the cold crisp chastisement of scissors as my hair falls in black puffy clouds. Confused coils, soft and intricate, beg to be caught again and again and holding them begs a reckoning—Me? Not me? In the straight-backed chair while my mother cuts my hair, in the full bloom heat of summer she freezes then puts a mirror in my hand— You look just like your father, and because her eyes are damp for once, I do not argue.