Today, I hate you and where you come from
Majda Gama
A Murder
Monty Reid
At work, Susan girl-friended me.
Susan cut my hair & advised me
on my coloring, I might be an Autumn
not a “Winter”. She liked the kicky layers
women wore in 2000, sliced by hand
with a razor. Did I know my hair
was looking a little thin. She had concerns.
She saw scars. Where I had fallen
in the 90’s in Seattle, needed stitches
but tough-girled the wound away
& flipped my unset mohawk
to the other side. Susan narrated
my scalp to me. The way it shone
or corded. So, it became foreign—
pigment & texture, burr of bleach
stripping my hair to whiteness. Just once
I should try being blonde. Susan
saw into the nature of my suffering
so keenly she could butcher it.
Saw fragrant light in me, then wanted
to snuff it. Took what I never offered:
my hand to touch her new breast,
or to stroke a lucky rabbit’s foot
although I was vegetarian.
As if that’s a good thing.
Ten years old, I was seized by the shoulders
then shaken in anger by a teacher
for speaking a forbidden word.
When Susan said what she said,
it wasn’t like the grip of violence.
No, it was done to me tenderly.
Her cheek almost touched mine.
Majda Gama is the author of In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls (Wandering Aengus Press) and The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss for the Two Sylvia’s Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has been honored with the Graybeal-Gowen award for Virginia poets from Shenandoah, a special mention from the Pushcart Prize for a poem published in Terrain.org, and a Gregory Djanikian scholar award for poetry from Adroit. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, AGNI, Forget Cool, Ploughshares, POETRY, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Swamp Pink, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and Under a Warm Green Linden. Find Majda on Instagram, BlueSky, and Facebook.
Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. He has coupled a 30-year career in museums (Provincial Museum of Alberta. the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Canadian Museum of Nature) with an even longer career as a poet. He has published a dozen full-length collections and almost 30 chapbooks with small presses across Canada and abroad. A new collection, Intelligence 1.1, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press and he is currently completing Intelligence 1.2. He worked for Arc Poetry Magazine for many years and was the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival, for almost a decade. Now retired, he can be found in his backyard garden, trying to grow peaches. Find Monty on BlueSky and Instagram.