Mary Simmons

Victorian Hair Jewelry

In the small hours, dead women pass
between aspens. Their footsteps crunch
in the forest slumbering above my head.
I wear my death from the crown, wisping
burial shroud growing darker, each year
mud from the roots.
            Bonnie snips strands of my hair
with birded embroidery scissors, wings flashing,
beak gnawing, loosing fibers.
            In the small hours, dead women press
my hair to their frostbitten cheeks.
            & the four of us sit in a tight ring
and weave gold wire through my death strands.
            & we sing without moving
our lips.

In the small hours, I know what it is
to shrink. Dead women wreath my brow
in honeysuckle promises. A blonde
inherited from sunflood’s grief.
            & we wrap rosettes around knitting
needles, flat flower my hair. Mourning begins
before life does. Mourning ends before mourning
begins. Beginning mourns split ends, swept
into a basket & left out for the crows.
            Each of us carries a ribboned bundle
of my death. Each of us mourns what grieving
mourns when grieving stops mourning
our flightless things. The wings we gave up.
Waxen, we blink.

In the small hours, I wander graves
to be surrounded by all those dead women.
            Butterflies molt against my fingers.
To wear this body each day is a taxidermy
of blunted knives.
            To bloody my knees. To swallow my hair.
            In March, I start to shed palmfuls
of daffodil bones. These curses begin and end
with me. Every sever a salt ring door.
            Around our necks, in our pockets,
under our pillows: my ghost body
flaxen and studded with thyme.

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Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from One Art, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, The Shore, Whale Road Review and others.