Hair

Always the sound of knots tearing, the scratch of hair against metal. Those summer evenings when I’d go by

Anu’s apartment on the floor above mine, #406, and watch her mother tug at her hair with a steel-toothed comb, their room

smelled of coconut oil and meat left over from dinner. She can’t cut her hair—ever. And so, every night is a tug of war

with her mother, whose brown fingers pull and rub, spreading the strands out like a sheet against her back. Anu’s father would laugh

at my skin, telling me to drink black tea, sit in the sun, darken up, and let my hair grow beyond my nape at least, his fingers

at the edge of my shirt collar. He’d never felt the edges of a scissor’s blade—his full gray beard and hair mixing in a weave of silver-black—

a patchwork, a lifetime of wants, which he rolled around the perimeter of his head and chin ending in a tight fist at the top. Her mother

whispered words into Anu’s scalp and neck, with each strand, a different story—of American boys and dances, where skin touched, hair swayed

down backs, of the mythic Sita walking into fire to prove her purity. We knew about American boys— how there were none in our neighborhood,

how they’d ride by on bikes, and we’d watch them from our bedroom windows and sometimes, from the front steps—their clean-skinned cheekbones,

smooth chests. All the while, Anu would move between her mother’s thighs like the fireflies we’d catch in our hands, humming and igniting against skin.