So you’re a…

Not mine.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don’t remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

— Hayden Carruth

pity this busy monster, manunkind

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

— E. E. Cummings

(Text gratefully c+ped from The Wondering Minstrels database.)

Yesterday I cut my hair. I’ve been cutting my own hair for years. I wrote a poem once about how I kept shaving my head bald, that that kept being the constant in my life even as everything else of me changed. Sometimes I’d cut it into a mohawk, when it didn’t interfere with employment, but at a certain point I realized it was interfering with things beyond my own ability to have a job and I stopped. (The linked article also references dreadlocks but with an inaccurate history; Wikipedia, of course. However, their Afrocentricity in the US is still critical.)

Then I began growing out my hair again.

This was partly gender reclamation: in trying to escape gender definition I restrained all of my body that i could, concealed classic gender markers, subscribed wholesale to the theory of androgyny as absence.

It was partly ethnic reclamation: my hair flags me as Jewish. It is curly and frizzy and wavy and does its own thing. I should listen to it more often.

For a while I trimmed it into a fat-hawk, which (especially since I still wore my hair down) I considered distant enough from the mohawk; I appreciated the gender-non-specificity of the hairstyle.

Then I began growing out my hair again.

During this time I got a job for which I interviewed as a woman except when at the second interview I came out as transgendered with a preference for male pronouns and who cares if people are confused. I fingerbrushed my longer hair to cover the inch-long hair at the sides, and generally that shorter hair wouldn’t poke out, except that sometimes it did. More recently, at fivish inches and with the way my hair curls and splays, it was definitely poking out like I’d been cutting gum out of my hair.

I don’t trust hairdressers in this straight-hair town. I went to the Safeway the other day, again foolishly thinking I might find a decent hair product. At seven in the morning, everyone wants to help you. Straight blond hair walks up with that offer and I say, no thanks, you wouldn’t know. She pushes. I say, I’m looking for shampoo that actually works with curly hair. She says oh, you’re looking to straighten it?

Okay, she’s not a hairdresser. Still, before I started cutting my own hair I had one count ‘em one good hair-cutting experience with the scissors in someone else’s hands, at a Supercuts surprisingly enough. This leads me to wonder if somewhere there’s also a magical Starbucks with good coffee.

I’m at one of those new beginning points, just in general, and those usually entail a physical manifestation of change in the form of cutting hair. I’ve got wonky flaps of hair poking through the hang-over from the top of my head; nothing about me can be contained, can it? I do not want to cut off all my hair. I grab my hair-trimming scissors, the ones I used to use to clean up my sideburns and now that I let those grow free I just use to trim my goatee, and I begin cutting.

I learn things as I cut. It’s the first time I’ve cut away to discover what was there, rather than to find my own head.

My hair is now mostly cut short, the top down to mid-ear and underneath fading down. It poofs out, which is why for so long I feared having this hair. It’s a very different gender read. The exception is two long clomps in the front, framing my face; these are an odd amalgamation of my history. In middle school I’d pull a couple clumps like this, much smaller, decorating the tops which snap-on rhinestones. They looked more like antennae then.

As I continue to struggle with getting my hair to look like I haven’t been rubbing the top of my head against a carpet, I’ve got fabulous scarves. Wearing one in a thinner band with the long strands out front, these portions look like payos.

Happy Purim.