Image credits from unsplash: (L) then (R) top to bottom: Maxim Potkin ❄ George Bohunicky Ayo Ogunseinde Frederick Medina Ravi Patel

Women love-hate it. Mess with it. Cut it. Shape it. Color it. Cover it. Spend way, way too much time and money on it. Complain about it. Laugh about it. Worry about losing it and want to pull it out sometimes.

Some women will even confess that their very well-being depends on how their hair looks and that a trip to the salon can make a world of difference.

I have tried, really thinking I wanted to be simply me, just my natural self, to grow the ever-present hair color from my naturally almost completely white hair. But no. I get about halfway there and boom: I’m back at the salon with red or blonde or brunette hair, depending on my mood. Maybe it’s the artist in me. Maybe it is vanity as Ms. Simone says.

I’d like to say here that a woman’s worth is not determined by looks, but I will admit that I do love it when the white is gone, the cut is good, and some bounce is back!

Whether one chooses to wear an elaborate coiffure, shave her head or go au naturale, one thing is certain: women have a complicated relationship with hair!

Please welcome Linda Simone to the pages of fws. In her poem, Salon, read her take on saving face, free therapy, and staying sane: it’s all about the hair!

Salon

This is where dreams blow real,
where you can feel yourself lose years, 
save face in the space of that swivel chair.
Where people who care, wrap you in terry, 
wait on you hand, foot and hair.
 
Watch yourself in the glass, all shaggy and gray, 
blossom beneath magic hands today.
Your stylist works scissors like a scalpel 
adding layers of meaning to a mane too full,
dabs on color like Picasso,
throws the therapy in for free.
 
Take a few hours of your time to be vain.
For a price, become the seductress: 
lovely, confident, sane.

Linda Simone’s work includes the poetry collection, The River Will Save Us (Kelsay Books, 2018), and two chapbooks, Archeology (2014) and Cow Tippers (2006). Her work was recently included in Poets to Come (Local Gems Press), an anthology commemorating Walt Whitman’s Bicentennial. Since moving to San Antonio from New York in 2015, her poems have been selected for the city’s 2018 Tricentennial and for the San Antonio Poet Laureate’s signature project. Visit more of Linda’s work here: www.lindasimone.com