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.

Irrigating for Dad you pace the summer pasture, weighting the dams with heavy stones but they lose hold and the life-giving liquid is lost down a far ield.

You think of his death as him swimming at sea, diving for shells, waves pulling him further and further out, depleting him of all he has to ight the foreign waters.

The towel wrapped around you now becomes a clot that will stop what your head and heart cannot help but lose every time water gushes as it does now in and around your memoried ears.