Below is a poem from Jen Karetnick’s collection of poetry, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, published by Cider Press Review.
Jen will be one of over 500 authors reading and speaking at the 41st annual Miami Book Fair from November 17-24. Jen’s reading will be at 11 am Saturday, November 23 in Room 8303. For more info visit MiamiBookFair.com.
My Hairstylist Is a Man Who Loves the Shape of a Woman’s
skull, its petite cliffs and canyons that he hikes
with his agile fingers, the dips and curves in
the road of a scalp that he reads like a triptych.
Otherwise indifferent, his Gucci model face
set as if for a permanent advertisement,
he converses only with the Italian men whose hair
he trims in between foiling and painting away
my personality, turning me as platinum and beach-
wave as every other woman in Miami. He envisions
me even less visibly than I view myself, I think,
until we go to the sink, and I lean back in the chair
while he rocks and cradles my head in his palms
the size of saucers, supporting my occipital
bone like a lizard caught to take outside, turning
me this way and that under the faucet, exploring
the only part of my aging body that interests him,
my drenched and gleaming skull showing off
its faulty crevices and divots like a landscape
or perhaps an archeological excavation, ancient
and revelatory, perpetually in danger of collapse.
