Today I visited the hair salon–
let my beautician take out her
second divorce’s wounds on me,
tugging tangles
in my muddy copper colored hair.
She winces at the youth
not yet gone from my sun speckled
skin, youth not gone
because I left and will never choose
to rot here, in some second hand smoke
double-wide, walls yellow
as daffodils in fool’s spring, with a man
praised for things like not being an alcoholic,
or leaving bruises that bloom
deep purple, deep cruel–
a bar oh-so-low, six feet
beneath the clay.
My father made me promise to get a degree,
so that’s what I’ve been doing
three years, and now I can code switch,
southern accent fading
‘till I come home, wielding it
like a tool, reverting
to conversations about pollen puddles, the ring
that isn’t on my finger
despite being the ripe old age of twenty– how boys
only want one thing, ain’t the heat–
it’s the humidity.
About the rats they found in DQ–
power plants being put up in a neighborhood,
fish it’ll poison–
liberals
climate change
Epstein
mercury
poison—
my cousin Sara’s wedding next week.
About how all things work together
for good, which isn’t true
or not in the way they mean it, at least,
tacked onto my grief,
in response
to my cousin’s accident–
like God smiled
at our pain, like we’re all puppets
on some celestial string,
but I bite my tongue and revert
into a world with bad theology, no asking God questions
for fear of getting struck down
Old Testament style
just accept it
despite David having plenty of “why’s”
in his poetry, and anger never being
the opposite of love– more like apathy.
There’s no reason.
But I take her good intentions,
and ask for extra layers to frame my face,
while she cuts more
than I asked for
and in the summer,
I’ll come back with fistfulls
of split ends she’ll harp about.
Caroline Lord was born and raised in rural South Georgia. She recently graduated from Berry College in Rome, Georgia, with a bachelor’s degree in both studio art and creative writing. Her work has appeared in publications such as Delta Poetry Review, Sink Hollow, and Violet Margin, telling stories deeply rooted in the South. Much of her poetry and visual art centers around faith and how it informs her understanding of coming of age.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 