Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Zinz: My Father's Hair

My Father’s Hair
by Jessica Zinz

With the small, black comb inside
the fold of his wallet, worn by years,
I’d shape my father’s hair.
I’d part it down the middle,
but always tilting off-center
because he was too tall,
even when I was lifted,
or he was pressed on his begging knees.

I’d start at the small, brown mole
above his forehead, below his hairline,
pulling back until I’d reached
the lump of his spine,
and start over several times.

My father’s hair grew wavy and short,
and didn’t always stay where I put it.
My mother said it would
do the same for her,
crinkle and ripple like a waterbed
without the stillness of its sleepers.

When my father’s hair was split in two,
he'd let me a use blue gel,
if he had nowhere to go, or had enough
time to shower out blue dirt.
Filthy, like the bathroom floor
before my mother decided to scrub it,
before she covered it with a rug.

One night, when my father came
home from work and from getting some
dinner and filling the car with
gas and picking up a paper
and stopping to have a beer with Paul,
my mother and I grew
upset with my father, about his tangled hair.
One night, my father left
after his shower and blow-drying,
after folding all of his clothes
and grabbing his toothbrush
and his small, black comb.

My mother has always told me,
even during last night’s rain,
that it wasn’t my fault he left
with knots in his hair
and didn’t come back to let me
gel and mousse his part,
to let me comb out his knots.

Late last night, when we were inside,
sheltered from the water falling from the sky,
my mother quietly told me
I could brush her grown-out hair.
I always try my best to part her curls,
and have learned to stop at her crown.
I’ll never see my mother’s hair knotted.

Jessica Zinz is a Creative Writing major concentrating in poetry, with a minor in Environmental Art, at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In the fall she will be acting as an editor for the Allegheny Review, Allegheny College's national undergraduate literary magazine, in which she has also published poetry. The mundane atmosphere of Meadville, her hometown, appears often in her work.