I’m going to skip over the fact that I neglected this blog for an eternity and just post a creepy story I wrote recently. It’s supposed to be about the intersections between hair and female power. I think about these concepts a lot, and was horrified/inspired by some reading I did recently about the symbolism of hair (specifically blond hair) as power during Victorian times.

 

the hair

He loved his wife best while she was sleeping. That beautiful hair glowing in the moonlight captivated him more powerfully than he was comfortable with. For hours after she went to sleep, he would look at the glossy locks swirling out from her head, covering the pillow and dripping out onto the sheets like a too-thickly-applied coat of paint. At times he would stroke it gently with his fingertips, feel its silky sturdiness, taking care not to let the hairs pull on her head and wake her. Other times he would gather a small section to rub between his thumb and forefinger, back and forth, back and forth, feeling the hairs roll over one another.

He grew certain the hair was speaking to him. He could see how it flirted with him, a faceless temptress. He felt as convinced about the hair’s messages as he would’ve had he been reading text, had the strands twisted themselves into a thick cursive, spewing out letters like an elegant alphabet soup. What he gleaned from the hair made sense to him in a way few other things did.

In the daytime, he and his wife floated orb-like. They moved about their home ruled by different planets, out of sync, self-contained. When she would say something to him from across the long dinner table, he would reflexively look up towards the ceiling. It was there he followed her words with his eyes, saw them vaporizing into the air before they could reach him, losing form, atomizing and drifting upward.

Night again: his relief. Him and the hair. He became comfortable speaking quietly to it, learning that this did not wake his wife. Quietly, he recounted the day, the thoughts that crossed his mind. He would often tell the hair how beautiful it was. He began to notice himself referring to his wife in the third person. She did this, she did that. It felt natural.

A small wave of discomfort entered his mind as he dwelled further on this thought: cleaved apart in his mind, the hair and the woman who was his wife. Unsettling. Just then, a streak of moonlight passed by the window, the hair flashing the reflection. His head snapped to attention. Immediately, he sensed a fierce energy emanating from the hair. He looked away and slept uneasily.

The next day he sought out his wife. He felt a pull to be near her, to listen to what she said, to ask her how she was doing. He found her in the garden, pruning the roses. As she swirled toward him, the hair followed her momentum, swinging onto her shoulder. He was startled by how dead it looked on her head, like a pelt. He forced his gaze to her eyes. “How are you?” She looked confused and snipped off a rose that wasn’t dead yet.

He ran away. He felt ill. He skipped dinner and hid in his office, fretting and then falling asleep, head on his desk, a stack of post-it notes embossing a square onto his cheek. Time trickled by. He woke up during the eerie handoff between moon and sun and tried to figure out how he felt. He thought of the hair: glorious, powerful….frightening. He thought of his wife. Them together.

His stomach leapt with a sudden desire to hold the hair in his fists, to caress his face with it, to tie it together with a ribbon and stow it somewhere. He wanted to carry it with him in his coat pocket, always with him: safe, kept.

Drastic, he opened up his desk drawer and searched for the scissors. He didn’t know how he would explain this to the hair or his wife, but he didn’t care, it had to be done. He walked back toward the bedroom with scissors pointed blade down, safety posture.

He stood at the precipice of the doorway and raised the scissors up, opened them. He could not see his wife well from this vantage point, just a rumple of sheets and pillows over a form. She must have slept poorly. He walked around the bed to look at her and the hair, the fear rising in his belly. He saw her face: eyes open, unblinking. Body not moving. The hair in two thick luminous ropes, clenched tightly around her throat.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about pain, strength, and healing — and also spending a lot of time at lucha libre. It has struck me how much tenderness there is be in something so seemingly brutal, and so I wrote a little scene on it. I still have a lot to learn about the history and culture of lucha libre, so I hope I’m not doing anything blasphemous or appropriating subject matter that’s not mine to write about. Maybe I’ll take it down once I think about it more, but for now, here’s my scene.

Luchador’s mother

We did it for all the mothers out there. The masks hide our faces which are squashed and ugly: peeled pistachios, sandwich bread with the crusts removed. We want them to focus instead on our weatherbeaten bodies, our biceps, our tattoos, our bellies full of canned beer and spinach. 

In the ring, we howl and yelp, curse obscenities, thud deeply into the ground and scrunch our faces. We want the moms to gasp, put their hands over their mouths, furrow their eyebrows in concern. When you can generate that kind of concern, our rise from the ground is made all the more noble. We un-twist our legs from the painful-looking contortion, set our mouths in a straight line, and gather the strength not just to stand, but to enact revenge on the one who harmed us. We are indefatigable and moreover we are brave. The moms are relieved, they sit with quiet pride, plan the meal they will feed us later. Oh, this feeling. 

The show is over and me and my fellow luchador are backstage embracing closely. The bare skin on our chests is touching. We each cry a little through our masks, for joy, for equilibrium, for something not yet grasped. We pull apart and bring the other’s bruises to our lips. Our breathing slows. We clasp our rough hands together, the tattoos on our fingers making art together, we can see each other through our eye holes and affirm the other’s nobility. We are grand in the eyes of ourselves, our mothers, the Lord. 

I bless my mother for teaching me this virtue. I think back to a time when I was small and I tripped while playing in the yard. I fell to my hands and knees: I remember the concrete stinging my skin, shock running up my body. My limbs were okay, but the fall had upset me, taken the buoyancy from my play, agitated something inside of me. I caught my mother’s eye as she read her newspaper inside. I wanted her to pay attention to me and hold me, and so I cried. But she knew as I did that the physical pain was trivial. She pressed her lips and set her eyes forward and continued reading. I will tell you that at that point my beckoning tears became tears of shame. I learned through her eyes that I was going to be fine, and carrying on like this was inappropriate. I stopped crying and made a point to internalize this lesson. I played more forcefully now, rolling around on the concrete, smashing my trucks together, making sure to leave bigger scrapes on my body than the ones from the initial fall. I took shelter deep within myself and let my body heal me, I smashed the pain apart between the trucks’ bumpers, I collected the shards and shoved them into my little jar, I closed the lid tightly so they could not leave. As a child, the lesson is hard, but it teaches you to carry yourself with strength and nobility. I have passed along to various other children I have come into contact with.

I have at times in life struggled with my posture. To reliably align it, I imagine a knife in my abdomen, drops of blood trailing behind me like little red acolytes. This image keeps my head high and my eyes set. Rib cage up.

Me and this beautiful luchador, together in nobility, we squeeze our hands one more time before letting go, parting the curtain, and walking into the ring. We regard the sea of mothers and take our bow. Nothing will hurt us.

Second art share! This one is very unfinished, and there are elements I don’t terribly like, but the themes have been on my mind lately. It’s about powerful female friendships — something I cannot overstate the influence of in my life. (Thanks to my partner for sparking the initial idea while we were watching Planet Earth.)

Lions

I stared ahead as she licked the blood off my back. Some of the blood was mine, some was the antelope’s. 

It was ten years ago that she found me and marked me as her hunting buddy. You. She was tall and lean, seemed even taller than she was with her head high like that, looking at everybody directly in the eyes. I was smaller than most of the other lions, head low enough to see the scars on her belly when she approached me. The first sign I could trust her. She saw me with my volumes on hunting strategies, my scratched-out equations for striking at the right angle. Books on antelope psychology. She saw the big tree branch I dragged home one day — nearly strained my neck to bring it all the way back. I used it to sharpen my claws, nudged it forwards and backwards to strengthen my neck muscles, propped it on rocks to practice my leaps.

I’d been watching her, too. She was the fastest runner I’d seen. Others would pretend not to notice, keep their heads forward and track her with their eyes. And she was so cunning. I once saw her slide up to another lion who had been hunting near us  — he’d caught a whole wild turkey — and when I looked back, seconds later, he was sharing the turkey with her, no apparent malice in his eyes. I don’t even know what she did or said. 

That day, she strode up to me like she always did, quick-paced, eyes forward, jaw tight. Two feet from me, she sat and curled her tail around her body. Stared at me. It was far closer than I’d usually let others near. Her presence was not a threat, but it was a pointed question. Sitting, her long front legs hid her underbelly. I stared back, trying to hold her eye contact. She could see that I was uncomfortable. Up close, I noticed how beautiful her mane was, how many thoughts lay behind her eyes. Giant brown caverns, born from the earth. 

There was no reflective moment, no measured choice. We followed the next steps like we were actors in a play, doing the moves sequence by sequence. I got up — stepped back to preserve a little of my space, and oriented myself towards the direction of the river, where we knew the animals would come to drink. She rose and strode alongside me, in silence — she knew I was in. Again she walked closer to me than I was comfortable with, but as the minutes went on, I began to grow accustomed. I lifted my head like hers and pierced the sky with my gaze. 

Our first kill. She spotted the antelope first, and I signaled for us to lurk lower under some nearby brush. I distracted it and she leapt up from behind, our movements dance-like in their choreography. Her arc from overhead, me springing from below. We toppled it, dirt and blood working their way into our fur as we rolled, but it was over. As we feasted, I noticed how she nudged the good bits towards me, looked to make sure I was getting my share.

I’m feeling bold today (further emboldened by the fact that I haven’t actually shared this blog link with anybody yet, so I’m basically writing to a void…), so I’m putting up the most recent semi-complete thing I’ve written. It’s my first poem — I was inspired to try writing something in this style after reading A Bestiary by Lily Hoang. It’s a bit dark, like most of my writing. Hope I’m not alarming anyone. This one’s about finding my own space.

 

Clean Paper

I’m not a person, I am a vase

A medium-sized vase.

You write something on your notepad with fierce bold lines, pushing your pen down hard with rage and passion

I am the page two pages down

Blank white but embossed with the imprint of you

Why write.

The bumps from your words cause me friction, each up-down of my pen reminding me “not your own not your own not your own…”

You’re a mountain range, visible from outer space. I’m the fuzzy little grass growing on top, making you soft.

I could be covered by snow in an hour, the deer could stamp me down or eat me, at my best and most glorious I’m the stairway to heaven for a lightweight insect, shepherding it three inches closer to the sun.

Maybe someone will take a picture of me and put me in a nature magazine.

You can’t see the cavities you leave on that notepad, how the sweat on your hands curls the paper, makes my ink bleed

My deepest wish is a new 500 sheet ream under the Christmas tree, complete with protective wrapping, or blank pages folded up inside my mailbox from an anonymous donor, or a grocery store receipt machine out of ink before the clerk notices it and I come home with a long, empty little scroll…

I dream white paper, white walls, sand washed smooth by the waves, tree trunks with nobody loving anybody etched on the bark.

Take your pen somewhere else, or write in invisible ink like me

..

But 

..

I fear that moment. When I’ve run far enough away with my treasure — 

Hidden in a cave where no one can find me

Pages so sharp and clean they’re practically a weapon

Pens on pens on backup pens: everything is ready

Me regarding the paper, bringing my right hand up close in the perfect three-point-grip they taught me in kindergarten

One millimeter away, I halt, the earth’s ice crawls up my legs, freezing them, the cold traveling upward —

It is there that I fall and I die

Time has snatched me because I had nothing to say

My epitaph will say Thanks for Being a Great Friend.