OVER SPRING BREAK I SHAVE MY MOTHER’S HEAD

She calls me, hands full of gold
weak like cornsilk, each strand snapped

and reflecting on the black
of her shirt. I leave that night,

fly home to make haste of all
the losing, to rob

the pores of their fine-boned lovers,
gravity of its relentless

floating. My father’s trimmer
suspended, hands scared to touch

the sore of her scalp, I could
only think of how mothers

and daughters ladder, egg grown
inside egg, stretching backward

like a sigh. How hair shimmers
before breath, how hormones shape

the baby, then the cancer.
How I am all stack and nest.

I was born bald, I was born
blue, umbilical cord wrapped

around my neck. I dyed
my hair jet black the night I left

for college and my mother
cried, called me a bitch. She says

You’re not my least favorite
child, just my most complicated.

I brace my wrist for the buzz,
answer over electric

pulse, I tried to hang myself
in utero. We laugh, float 

the sound on bathroom tile.
With each pass of my arm, sun

drops to the floor.

---

Shannon Moran (@shannyyy) is a writer and artist originally from Baltimore, MD, currently living in New York City. Her work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Letters Magazine, and Nimrod. She has been the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, the Sophie Kerr Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She loves lipgloss and layer cake. Read more at www.shannonmoranwriter.com.