Because I Can’t Not: Ars Poetica

by Allie Spikes

I shave my head
on my friend’s sultry Texas
porch. Swollen West Nile mosquitos
 
hang in the whir of falling
strawberry locks. My reflection
bends, my new jaw softer
 
than I want. The blue of my skin
glares too pink underneath, like baby
mice freckled by chicken
 
pox and scorn. Looking
in the mirror without hair
is like catching a glimpse of myself
 
mid-howl. The why’d you cut
all your hair off? after each successive
shaving spree cushions my palate
 
with needled saltwater. I drown
thumbing through a Rolodex
of arguments I might use
 
to satisfy this interrogation:
to slice off my sex
appeal, my femininity, a semblance
 
of a lesser grief in my own
skin. To nettle you, like the stinging
kind that bit my friend’s ass
 
on the side of a Belgian highway
when she wandered past the edge
of the dusky woods to squat.
 
To malign your synaptic
polarization. To summon censure
from him, from them, from her, and that guy
 
who works in electronics at Target, the guy
with the red polo, sweat-stained
khakis and Pringles addiction.
 
Because after I shave my head,
every room is better-lit, and the
skepticism in your eyes matches
 
the urgency in mine.
So that when my daughter
wishes on a star
 
for a mohawk, I won’t dither. On the porch,
I will swim up to meet her at the surface
with a DEET bomb, to undrown,
 
to see how many facts about the lifecycle
of an earthworm we can hang together
on the razor’s caffeinated hum.

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ALLIE SPIKES served as managing editor of Bellingham Review from 2019-2020. She currently serves as prose/poetry editor at Psaltery & Lyre. Her essays have been shortlisted at Creative Nonfiction, at Fourth Genre for the 2020 Steinberg Essay Contest, and for The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award in 2019. Her poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in River Teeth, Literary Mama, and Dialogue.