MAYDAY

Garçon
by A. Shaikh

Contributed By:

This poem was selected as the winner of the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

A. Shaikh
Courtesy of A. Shaikh

My father enacts a different sensitivity when he cuts my hair. His fingers are outlandish inside the kid scissors as they snip and swipe and swirl the dark matter off my shoulders, my ears. Then there is the buzz, the boysound of the electric razor as it binds to my neck. Like this, I become myself, by my father’s hand. The daughter shedding skin into something better loved. When I trace the word back in French, I am simultaneously exile and heroic. In some etymology, also wretch. The many ways to be a man. At night I wonder if this is all a desperate cry to know my father. To understand his origins. In between inches cut, I dream him young, handsome, a friend. We are in my old country and he does not purl his grief riverside. In this story, I can comfort him how only some men can comfort each other, a nightly touch so effective he never marries my mother. In this story, I cease to exist. My body no longer a body. A distant memory. Across, beyond, through. This way lies madness, my mother would say, co-opting a myth neither of us have read. I am allowed no excuse, whereas she has plenty. After the haircut, I sink to my knees in the shower, letting the heat weight wash over me. The flecks of hair spiral down. Why is this also an elegy? For the first time in months, I photograph myself. I tilt my jaw up and down, let my tongue curl over my bottom lip. I know I am undesirable to everyone but the trained eye. And so, my brother calls me his brother, and my mother doesn’t see me at all. At least we all praise my father’s skills, his kindness. How he spent Saturday morning trimming me whole.

A. SHAIKH (he/she/they) is a queer immigrant poet raised in the tangerine summers of Texas. They are the 2021 winner of THE BOILER PRIZE, an inaugural fellow of the Strange Tools Writer’s Workshop, and an Aquarius who loves the color blue. You can find their poems in Underblong, Poets.org, and elsewhere. This fall, they will continue writing as an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Their internet thoughts reside @apricotpoet.

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