My Hairstylist Is a Man Who Loves the Shape of a Woman’s

skull, its petite cliffs and canyons that he hikes 
with his agile fingers, the dips and curves in 
the road of a scalp that he reads like a triptych. 
Otherwise indifferent, his Gucci model face 
set as if for a permanent advertisement,

he converses only with the Italian men whose hair 
he trims in between foiling and painting away 
my personality, turning me as platinum and beach-
wave as every other woman in Miami. He envisions 
me even less visibly than I view myself, I think,

until we go to the sink, and I lean back in the chair 
while he rocks and cradles my head in his palms 
the size of saucers, supporting my occipital 
bone like a lizard caught to take outside, turning 
me this way and that under the faucet, exploring 

the only part of my aging body that interests him, 
my drenched and gleaming skull showing off 
its faulty crevices and divots like a landscape 
or perhaps an archeological excavation, ancient 
and revelatory, perpetually in danger of collapse.

JEN KARETNICK

Jen Karetnick’s fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020), an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist and a Kops-Fetherling Honorable Mention. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing widely. See jkaretnick.com.