Barber Shop

Announce me, let them know I am coming. Carry me into the arena on a King Carrier. I come from a lineage of linebackers. My knuckles are a mountain range. Your booing only makes me more powerful. I have hidden a razor in my glove wrappings like a grandmother.

In the barber shop, ancient appraises ancient; we all remember how golden the land when we took all those large animals west; we argue over who shot the last buffalo. It was me. I almost asked if they would pull out a tooth that’s been bothering me. I almost mentioned all those bodies littering the landscape.

We can’t keep track of what the final frontier is anymore. I assure you, I wore Annie Oakley boots while I was bush piloted into Alaska, the tundra. I walked up a long road, the northern-most highway, and walked into the last bar where the sun doesn’t set for half of the year.

I needed a special suit for space. They made it for me, tucked in at the waist, flattering. My ass looked good. I bounded through space shrapnel, and my hair still looked windswept within the helmet. It was unclear where I was going—until it was clear nobody had ever gone that far out.

That umbilical cord snapping and I am adrift, I have pushed the boundary too far. The haircut itself, shaved, looks good. Makes me feel like a rock. Ancient. I remember when the continents hauled ass in separate directions. I predate gender. I am military grade. I am no-man’s land, no person’s land, I do man-makers at the gym.

I’m in the middle of the ocean, I floated and forgot my body existed. In the water, in zero gravity, my body is neither kind of body. I was neither for a millennium, I got tangled in blistered plastic, I washed up on a trash island. I am a selkie. I slipped out of my seal skin. I cut my hair.