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.