Beauty has become an action, a thing I do to myself.
When the white man glared me up and down
as he passed by my bench on the sidewalk, mumbled something about me
having a bad hair day when I was not, I looked at him bored, took another bite
of my cake and said, I’m having a phenomenal hair day
and went to class shortly after.
And when, in that same afternoon, I choked out an immediately tearful,
thank you to the Black woman who stopped me mid-sandwich
to say she loved my hair, I sat for a few minutes longer
under this shaded bench, stunned by the irony of the body.
My friend’s mother reminds me that I always have a free trim waiting
in her home; she lists a million and one remedies
for my too dry ends, tells old, recovered stories
while parting my hair, guiding the comb from my nose to my neck, and
nothing is personal but this: piles of my snipped excess crowning
the floor, kitchen tiles supporting decades of promises in calloused hands,
there is always someone to take care of There are always those fluent
in bringing dead things back to life.