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Carmen

Posted on 12.13.19 by Alison Cantrell

Poetry by Remi Seamon

I have four dreams in a row
about my mother’s hair, unpinned,
dark silk, and the unrelated warmth
of oranges in the crux of her neck.

She keeps her beauty to herself
at Church, in the field, in bad harvest scraped
into a scarf, dirt hands wounded with hunger.
Only for these yellow nights and the mornings
rubbing their dawn-bruised fingers over the stove,
she unbraids herself into sleek curtains where I can vanish
the top of my head, the swish of parting, these threads of light.

My mother
whose hair men always want
to disappear into. Peering around
the peeling moon, eyes flayed.
My father
with five of his fingers, pulling,
the long line of her neck, soft violence,
her breath hitching
its skirts in her throat—

I think love is a wonder.

The next time she balances me
on her hip, I want to get my fingers in her hair.
I want to eat oranges.
Querido, stop that. Be gentle.

There was always this, the unobserved
thinning of her scalp and the ends
becoming frayed, the lackluster
quiet caverns of space
her body made in itself.

The day after [                       ]
I find her hair in clumps
on the pillow.

And I wake up and can’t remember what tree
we tucked her under or the long crescents of her nails
prying back skin, the bright pith caught, the orange
like suns, like days eating
their own ends.

This strange, unpeeled segment of my life—
who was I then who did not know grief?
Who wanted to live
in her hair?


Remi Seamon is a sixteen-year-old poet from Seattle, Washington, who currently lives in the UK. Despite its best efforts, high school English has not managed to quell her love of literature.

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