Rosemary mint fingernails and swept pieces of my
brown hair turning black and blue.

I thought hair curlers were firecrackers,
time capsules, controls to a space cruiser still
waiting for me to land it on Venus-- I crammed my 
jean-pockets with teal curlers. 
I was seated in the pleather
black chair that treated me like a young
duke at Kuts and Karats hair salon where
I learned about beauty through the
way another woman's hands cut me like a shelf
doll-- hair snipped to save in sacks--
salvaged pieces of the closest star--
I don't know if my mother still has it but
one time when I was still firecracker curious I
looked through my parents sock drawers and I found a bag
of my hair from when I was a baby-- Those scraggle clippings 
like legs of a bruised spearmint bush-- foreign fickle strands 
reminded me how I was once like a hunk of wool drawn
forth by the spinning wheel--spindle yanked
from the gaping mouth of God's 
desk lamp-- clicked off the bulb to smell
my hair fresh and sturdy in a mirror--
mint musty with rosemary-- it smelled like
dukes and roses and clean. The same woman 
asked me how old I was while I pretended
to read magazines about how many mint leaves most
ladies should eat and how many times you 
can cut off your hair before you become
a slut or a lesbian-- I was a duke
and I hadn't know what sluts and lesbians were 
yet-- I knew time capsules and firecrackers
and the control station intended for Venus--
I didn't like that she had to wash my hair
before she cut it-- neck crinkled--crooked 
laid back on the hem of a sink drenched
in rosemary mint fingers nails that dug
trenches in my scalp-- set them ready for planting
and fields and wheat whiplash from the 
firecrackers or the pull of the spinning wheel
still yawning out of the moon in eternity--
when I said I wanted to dip my hair 
different-- draw myself from
the soft neck of a river or the swelled
underbellies of each leaf-- punch my
hair black-blue. Rosemary mint and fingernail
sown in the sink with the cut flecks of
stars-- I didn't know I would have read about
myself as the lesbian or and the slut-- I would
call myself a girl until it was black-blue
punched out of my brown hair-- I didn't hate my hair
brown so much as I hated the way you had begun
to see my wearing it-- not like
a girl who controlled a landing on Venus
but the girl who was trying to find enough
hair ties to pull the hair from her
eyes when she punched the rosemary mint
from each follicle-- and the trick of it
is you can't dye the slut or the lesbian out
of your hair so add a blue streak to the bruises
and send yourself to Venus with the hair curler--
wash yourself with rosemary and mint in the shower--
you can be a slut and lesbian spun
from something other than light-- bruise your
neck over the sink and save your clipped
hair in bags to remember where you were pulled
from and what colors you faded and yet
still smelled like mint and rosemary
and clean.