Haircut

When I tell my mother I am in love with a woman. She looks up from the frying pan and I look down as she asks me what it is that we do. She means sexually. She wants details. I think it's time to invest in coconuts. Never learned to stomach the smell of my mother’s palm oil inside her American kitchen. Announcing itself in hot splatters across the clean lines of the cold porcelain. I still lay my temple across a cool surface, splay my troubles atop a tiled floor. Limbs like I'm seven again, naked from the waist, beneath my mother's steady hand and long silver scissors. Which always feel like surprise ice against my chubby pubis. Eyes pinned East beneath her impatient voice. I said don’t move. My girlhood, open as the morning blinds, the light I wish was brighter. When Mom's finished cutting, she dusts the loose hairs like a janitor, underpaid. Sighs. Now I'm allowed to be a girl again. Pull up my shorts to play. Outside the air tastes like honeysuckle and I am on the cusp of forgetting. Until she calls me home. I pretend not to hear her questions. She wants to know where I am going.