As I gather

Abstract

As I gather Dora Malech (bio) my hair back from my face,I smooth at the temples with my palms butthen move down the length to end in a fist,which I hold for a moment as I pullto cull casually the errant strandbroken by the elastic band, or cullby more unsettling clump the throwawayflyaways. On my way to a lunch dateor a meeting, I surreptitiously dropthe telogenic tangle on the sidewalkor shake it off my hand and out the windowof the moving car before it can clingto my shoulders like bedraggled epaulettesconveying not military authority but frazzledabsentmindedness or worse (depression?vitamin deficiency? pregnancy?).The strands scrawl the sink in long lineslike the mark the pissed-off kid keyed intoautomotive paint, or like my doctor's signaturereduced from letters' legibilityto the P-wave of an EKGafter years of autopilot signing scripts,or like the creeping internodes of stolonsin my garden. The billboard overChestnut Street features a new campaign,a bottle of shampoo daydreamingof a second life: "I want to bea hairbrush. Recycle me." At another corner:"I used to be a plastic bottle. Now Itravel the world." At happy hourI glance from birds emboldened underfootby bits of tortilla chips fallen on the patio,to the heads of my neighborhood friends,and back again, and picture Thea, Khaliah,and Cassie's hair entwined in mine and cradlingsome speckled eggs. I know I can't be entirely [End Page 69] alone in hoping birds will use our hairto build their nests, weave it through the twigsand straw and string and make of us somehabitable dwelling, or rather, if birds useour hair to build their nests, I know I can'tbe entirely alone. All I wantis some part of me to be useful, orbeautiful, or both (the best of worlds),and I'll take it as it comes, even in leavingsand only in avian reverie, a hypotheticaltreetop bower I'll never see. When my ex and Iparted ways, we each left the other with a gift.He kept the drawings I had made in our sharedtime and space, strands of color tanglingto form. I kept the nest he found by the corral,woven from the coarse lengths of manes and tails.I like to imagine a whole herd woundround and into one, an animal vortex,which, if given the opportunity,could run faster and farther than I can evenimagine my body taking me. I scourthe bathroom, if sometimes less than diligently.My husband does his share. This morning,he asked if I noticed he had cleanedthe mirrors. What hair that gathers onthe chrome lotus pod of the bathtub drainswirls to take its shape, a wet rosette.I swipe it up. Still, our showers tend to endin standing water, always a clog fartherdown inside the pipe eventually.The culprit's always mine. Is me.I check myself in the un-marred mirrors,re-pin what inevitably flies free. [End Page 70] Dora Malech Dora Malech is the author of Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications that include the New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, and Best American Poetry. She has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writers' Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center, and a 2017 Amy Clampitt Residency. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications