Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
A Girl Combs Her Hair
after Li Ho
Recently cut she is unaccustomed
to the blunt end
just above her moist shoulders.
Even in the morning
the air feel close—closer
than his shirt
slipped over her head.
The comb glides through the luster,
and stops short.
She thinks of fingers. Hands
gripping the small of her back. She leans
against the wall. He could have
brought flowers. The girl wants
to sit for a while on the fire escape:
to listen to the water
draining the open fire hydrant
and cooling the street and children—
to figure out the look he gave
when she turned and small hairs
scattered across the pillow. But already
it’s so oppressive. She would collect
all her combs and snap them in half
but a scent keeps her
from moving from the sheets.
By her scandals she notices an orchid
in white tissue. She reaches.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020). Her previous works include The Artist’s Daughter (2004) and The Narrow Road to the Interior (2008). She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York. She received her MA in Japanese literature from Columbia in 1984. She is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. (updated 4/2022)