'Hair' and 'Birthing the Body' in Samyukta Poetry

 So Samyukta Poetry had a queer themed issue in June 2020 (my birth month!), so a couple of poems got featured there. As well as a youtube video--- my very first-- WOW!!

A link to the journal issue here and to the youtube video here

Hair 

She told me you cut those long black tresses

 suli in Axomiya, falling to your waist since a time

before I can remember. She showed me a picture

of you with new frizzy hair.

I wish I could have collected your beautiful fallen hair

I wish I could have preserved a piece of you

which you no longer wanted..

I wonder how your juda stick will feel from disuse and neglect now

Will you discard it, throw it away?

Will you keep your hair short now, send out short hair pictures?

Or let it grow long again?

My hair is emotion for me.

I caress it, twirl it, fiddle with it constantly

When I am upset. You are the only person

Who could make me cut it. On an impulse,

I want to cut my hair to be like you.

To keep you in me. To forsake the hair

Instead of forsaking you. Hair is precious,

But you are priceless. But that would

Be silly. I will preserve the old you for a while longer

My long black waist length tresses like yours

Tied up with a stick the way yours used to be,

Can I keep my hair and keep you too, I wonder?

 

Someday I will cut my hair like you

(Only you can make me do it).

Some of my hair turned white with PhD anxiety.

Sometimes, when macabre and gloomy, I think of killing

Myself, and presenting all my long cut-hair to you as proof.

I will cut my hair short when it’s mostly white

Like yours, or maybe like your sister’s

I will prance around with hair, blue, purple and green.

 So my hair is growing ripe and white and I am about to turn 32

You were 32 when I met you first. It’s been fourteen whole years.

Birthing the Body

“You dress just like your mother”, you said. “Why?”

I was flummoxed.

I had never thought I dressed like my mother

I had hardly thought about the way I dressed at all.

I wore whatever people gave me

I privileged the inner over the exterior

I thought fancy clothes as being frivolous

I did not know that I repeated the age-old privileging

of mind over body, man over woman, spiritual over physical

 

You taught me how to own my body

To play with it, experiment

the purpose of dressing is to feel beautiful

 not only to look

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

And my physique was similar to yours

The dark skin, the long face, the lean frame, and the long black rippled hair

So as I darkened my eyes, put up my hair, slipped in danglers,

pierced navel and nose and inked a tattoo like you,

Truthfully the most beautiful woman I have ever seen

I started to fall in love with the image I saw in the mirror

My body, and the way I adorned it, owned it

Even when thoughts and emotions were in disarray

 

Instead of dressing like my mother, I started dressing like you

If my mother birthed my body, so equally did you.