BEAUTY SHOP Anita Tanner For Len First hairdo after his death you lean back, your neck guillotined on the bowl’s rim, the pulse in your temples heavy as sea water, your bones wearying, pocked as sea coral, your eyes like scaled ish left out to dry on the deck of circumstance. Your hair in the running water becomes a child gone too deep, lailing in the sulphur pool, panicking at what water can do when your strokes and footing fail you, guttural gulps burning down a wrong throat. You cough and spit and ight for air, your eyes alame, watering like small ditches on the family farm.
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