a failure of discipline, treatment. Forget any question of beauty. Forget any seizing on unique. I looked only to pass.
SWIMMING O L I V I A K L E VO R N
Curly is not what biracial black hair is. It is the word white people use to describe it on shampoo bottles and salon brochures, but that is because they do not care to observe and record its distinct nature. It is really like cotton balls plugging outwards in masses from the skull. It is really like the underside of a homeowner’s hedge,1 where hands 1 In a legal anthropology class I read a civil court get lost and fiddle with waves smooth and slight until they once transcript. A woman allowed lay-tight-lay-right in the dirt. Sprouting cottonballbramble the hedge in the front of her house to outgrow its thickets out of the skull oozes the fragrance of academicboundary and cross her brick grade “moral confusion” coaxes people into a grateful driveway into her neighbor’s Although she and her blindness, calling it curly, and in doing so, making it clear yard. neighbor shared the drivethat it should aspire to be not what it is but how they way equally, the hedge had clearly begun to encroach would most prefer to see it. on his property. And, what And so biracial black and black women go through was worse, its branches had his front lawn the ritual, drag baby girls to the hair salon, carve out two penetrated and begun their advance hours on a Thursday to sit in the beauty shop, suffer the beneath a thin layer of topsoil, ruining his sod. The burn of strands limp with relaxer (white paste with slight transcript was meant to demconcentrations of formeldahyde), press into skullskin onstrate bias in the language of civil court. sweetsmelling shimmer spray or flowery pomade, when woman refused to deswet with water, feeling its expansion against the hot dryer, The troy her hedge, citing a claim like a thirsty stomach swelling against the will. We call to personal property. The neighbor, a white business this self-discipline. We call this “getting our hair done” or owner, explained plainly “to burn, cut, hack, spray, spit, batter, and beat the hedge that his homeowner status entitled him to certain rights until it is suburb-grade sod or something close to that.” that were beyond the scope After leaving my friends at the pool I go to my mother. of her claim to landscape. The neighbor won the case, In front of the hotel bathroom mirror, her hands full and she, with her hedge, of pink lotion that smells like coconut and suntan oil, she was forced first to ply off its with a hacksaw and, parts my hair into sections and braids, wetting it down until branches when that would not work, it turns a dark brown, running the tips of her fingers across uproot the plant in its entirety and place it in a series of the tender parts in my scalp. This is a satellite version of dumpsters set in the alley the beauty salon ritual. Use product to dothis. Use enough behind the two houses. A few
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