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Caroline Crew

Caroline Crew is the author of PINK MUSEUM (Big Lucks, 2015), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays appear in Conjunctions, Salt Hill Journal, and Black Warrior Review, among others. She’s online here: caroline-crew.com.

Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs


I’m wasting myself

                 on improvement, feel a watercolour creeping

                              across the screen

                                              where I should recognise my own face—

pastiche is one way

              to eradicate the body. I promise

                                                I will be self-fashioning

                                                            to the remains I’ve shorn on the cold tile.

Brute of my own hair,

               do I deserve betterment—do you?

                                I will be self-fashioning—

                                               uh huh. Let these leftovers go their own way,

                                                                arise from the wreck

                                                                              of braiding: a monument to myself.

                                 A storm could come in—

                                                 bother this soft

                                                              trophy to life. I have mocked myself up.

I wanted so much

               to undo the dolls of my childhood,

                           I slipped the knot

                                            of memory instead—do not know if my crown

                                                        is crooked or some plastic

                                                                        replica staring down my strongest attempt

                                                                                                                                                             at sovereignty.

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