This poem was written for the latest mini-challenge from Read Write Poem — write seven poems about the body in the context of October. I chose “hair” for the theme of my second poem. Enjoy.

P.S. If you want to read everything else I wrote for the mini-challenge, click here.

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My hair betrays me. In the summer, it curls endlessly
on itself, becomes a nest of snakes hallucinating
and searching for prey first in one direction, and then
the other. As the Kundalini of mercury rises
up the thermometer’s thin glass spine, my hair
also rises – and once that quicksilver line
busts the bottom of ninety degrees and explodes out of the neck
in arced silver plumes, the spines of my curls then kink
into impossible configurations, tumble like hurled water over cliffs
and into canyons. They are dervishes in their crazy whirls,
trying to spin the chemicals off their backs and
re-merge with the Divine in their original state of wild. They obey
the silent calls of my DNA.

But when the air becomes cold crystalline,
when it becomes decorated with the drunk, biting amber
of hot apple cider, my curls
hibernate. My mane becomes my servant. The snakes sleep,
become lazy and limp, let themselves be bent and flattened
by irons, willingly die beneath the hot wind
of a hair dryer. But every once in a while,
in the stillness of nighttime furnace heat,
beneath a black blanket of cotton snow,
and in that space of awake between bracketed
pairs of dreams:

in that silent indigo void,
I can hear a curl or two
slither at midnight, awakened
by my own sweat.

Written 10/8/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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