Dishevelment
While all the salons are
closed and we’re closeted at home,
our hair continues to
grow. It pushes forward,
reaches record lengths,
exposes shameless roots.
Shipwrecked, desperate, we
scour our cupboards for sheers,
study YouTube tutorials. Make
feeble attempts to snip, pluck, trim.
Alas! We’ve lost our
shape, our bob, our look. Our colour has faded.
And hair dye—that most
magical potion—is nowhere to be had.
Store shelves are bare.
Even Amazon’s pockets are empty.
Some small-minded,
nefarious soul has hoarded it all.
Let the universe pronounce
a sentence! Show no mercy.
Like the envious in
Dante’s Purgatorio, let the sinner’s eyes be sewn shut
while we, in our
despondent, humbled state, reach for beanies,
scarves and baseball caps.
Turn our mirrors to the wall.
Yield to our collective
dishevelment.
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s stories,
poems and essays have been published in Best Canadian Essays 2019 and Best
Canadian Essays 2015, The Antigonish Review (forthcoming), Grain,
EVENT, Prairie Fire, Malahat Review, subTerrain, carte
blanche, Room, Crux, The Centrifugal Eye, Qarrtsiluni, The
Occupy Anthology and Water Lines: New Writing from the Eastern
Townships of Quebec.
Tanya has been nominated for a National Magazine
Award as well as a Western Magazine Award and received a Canada Council Grant
for her memoir manuscript, Peacekeeper’s Daughter. She holds an MA
from McGill and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
See Brian Henry’s schedule here, including writing workshops,
weekly online writing classes, and weekend retreats in, Alliston, Bolton,
Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina,
Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland,
Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton,
Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York
Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.
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