1.
Helen’s shock of red
hair corkscrewed from her head
like a crooked halo.
I forced my hair down
with dark clips. Plastic teeth
and their shallow pricks. My sharp-toothed boyfriend
had a goth look. Aesthetic value
of dark circles and black-painted nails.
He railed against Helen
revealing too much—her flaws
raw, her neck exposed as she gushed
exclamations; as she maddened
the stylishly composed boys
with her melodramatic vein of expression.
When her volume increased, those boys stalked
from the room. They couldn’t stand
her superfluous spurting of adjectives.
Fluttering fingers and pages
of works in progress…
I was stylish too.
I kept my rough drafts concealed,
even though they outnumbered the polished products.
I secretly admired Helen’s messy revelations.
None of us could have predicted
what she would do next.
For me, espresso was just another black accessory,
but she drank frothy lattes
with cinnamon sprinkles on top.
She spooned me coffee-flavored ice cream
in the Student Union. I smiled at her
when my boyfriend wasn’t there. She smiled back.
Such simple memories might have faded,
but they linger like steam rising up
from open vessels. Maybe we could have been friends,
chatting over cappuccino, in a few more years.
Maybe I could have trimmed her hair,
saved a bright curl as souvenir. Instead,
it was just a quick smile, a tiny tilt
of my lips before I fastened them back to bittersweet accessory.
2.
She walked out of her dorm room
and nobody knows the small details
of what she did next. Was it improvisation
or a work in progress she’d devised long ago,
had secretly revised for months, never revealing
too much? Was she drunk? Did she lose control
to a villain who tied her down,
laid her head across the railroad tracks,
tilted toward the oncoming wail?
Frothy foam, cinnamon sprinkles, spilling
red hair. Free flowing after a line break
that nobody can revise. No more words
forced between college-ruled lines
just huge bold black bloodied
tracks. Men had to come
clean up the mess from her head
in the dark of that night.
My boyfriend said she got what she deserved,
a kind of immortality. He said he was writing a poem
for her, but it was tiny script contained
on one neat page. None of his images had impact.
His dark circles were eyeliner. I was also
guilty I couldn’t stop the flow
of my pen. My cliched grip on black ink.
My workshop revisions getting slicker
and more stylish as if I was dolling up
her decapitation. Her red head was just a glossy
maraschino cherry bitten off at the stem.
Her exposed neck was cauterized just so
the style mongers could stalk away
with a new image glazing their lips.
