"Bath House" by Marisol Brady
Preventative Measures in Chinatown Hair Salon by Nova Wang
And in this poem, I am drowning.
Face-down in my mother’s bathtub, soap rivering
the floor, shorn hair clotting
silt-thick against the sides.
I am a drainage problem. I keep choking
the pipes. I hold water so long it scums
in my hands, stagnant, quivering
with flies. My whole life, I let my hair flood
my back—easy to rope into a braid or
leash, easy to grab. During showers,
it plasters my neck and spine,
outlines each notch
of bone. In sixth grade, my friend sheared
eighteen inches so men couldn’t drag
her into dark alleys, unroot her body
from her scalp. In ninth grade, I unrooted
a strand and slid it under the microscope
so my cells sharpened—follicle, shaft,
root—body revealing itself
under glass. I draw every diagram top
to bottom. Left to right. Like I’m writing 汉字
And my mother tells me these things have order,
even toward the same result.
Here is the order I follow: look
both ways, cross the street, tuck
my ponytail in my coat.
I’m sheathing all my future wounds.
Flinching from my probable deaths--
I don’t know whether to grip the blade
or give it up. I don’t trust myself
with my hair, so I enter the salon
and tell the 师傅 to chop. She readies the scissors
and pushes my shoulder down. The warmth
of her palm, cupping my neck.
Face-down in my mother’s bathtub, soap rivering
the floor, shorn hair clotting
silt-thick against the sides.
I am a drainage problem. I keep choking
the pipes. I hold water so long it scums
in my hands, stagnant, quivering
with flies. My whole life, I let my hair flood
my back—easy to rope into a braid or
leash, easy to grab. During showers,
it plasters my neck and spine,
outlines each notch
of bone. In sixth grade, my friend sheared
eighteen inches so men couldn’t drag
her into dark alleys, unroot her body
from her scalp. In ninth grade, I unrooted
a strand and slid it under the microscope
so my cells sharpened—follicle, shaft,
root—body revealing itself
under glass. I draw every diagram top
to bottom. Left to right. Like I’m writing 汉字
And my mother tells me these things have order,
even toward the same result.
Here is the order I follow: look
both ways, cross the street, tuck
my ponytail in my coat.
I’m sheathing all my future wounds.
Flinching from my probable deaths--
I don’t know whether to grip the blade
or give it up. I don’t trust myself
with my hair, so I enter the salon
and tell the 师傅 to chop. She readies the scissors
and pushes my shoulder down. The warmth
of her palm, cupping my neck.
Nova Wang is probably thinking about ghosts. Her writing appears in publications including Gigantic Sequins, Fractured Lit, and Whale Road Review, and she tweets @novawangwrites. You can find more of her work at novawang.weebly.com.
Marisol Brady is a self-taught photographer whose work examines the ephemerality of capitalist excess, nostalgic distortion, times we’ve had, times we’ve been told we had, and the time we have left. They cast an optimistic, neon-lensed glance at the decay precipitated by the hyper-escalating economic inequality and planetary destruction of the past four decades that, with some squinting, recognizes its transformative potential. Originally hailing from Long Island’s south shore, Marisol lives in Brooklyn.
