Negative space
you know i’m my mother’s daughter because i will always look at the price of a thing before looking at the thing itself
Airbnbs, Bangtan concert tickets, cab rides, dead body freezers, Emily Dickinson’s
herbarium, flower pots damaged by a car reversing right onto them, garden management,
hysterectomies, incarceration, Jor Bagh houses, Kahlua and milk, love letters, mosquito
repellents, noise-cancelling headphones, old acquaintances, PhDs abroad, queerness, rat
traps, shaved heads, therapy, Uniqlo shirts, vacations, window seats on Indigo flights,
xeroxing pages outside campus copy-shops, youth as represented on film, zero self-imposed
expectations.
quarantine ruined my perfect dyke haircut
Last June my mother cut my hair for the first time in ten years. I sat for three hours under her
careful hands, frayed burgundy locks falling to my right side and new black outgrowth on the
shorn side, trembling heavy queer body holding itself close and quiet—every breath clung to
my chest, afraid.
What would it take for the secrets to crash into the shared air between us like the large size
Act II ready-to-cook popcorn jammed into too tiny a pan, with no room to pop but outwards?
Her fingers rubbed down the bone behind my ears, tenderly brushing off clumps of hair stuck
to my sweat. I wondered if she could already tell she was touching something that had
changed irreparably past the point of her memory.
Later, the shower washed away the prickly ends itching my neck before the tear at corner of
my lips stopped stinging, salty.
She cut my hair again come October.