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Girl with a Bowl on Her Head
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
44 Girl with a Bowl on Her Head When I was a girl, my mother always made me wear a wooden bowl on my head. She wanted to keep people from looking at me and it worked. No one ever really saw me, but only the bowl, or what they thought they might have glimpsed concealed below, and soon I became secretive as an acorn. I cultivated a new way of seeing and became a connoisseur of strange, vegetal things kept hidden inside—the second miniature bell pepper nested inside the first like a Russian 45 doll, green, with the intricate curl and fold of an ear. Or how the inscrutable placid carrot ripening into anarchy splits wide open and bares its ropey length of barbed, thorny spine. Or the tearing apart of spicy cool globes of oranges to sometimes find an extra section, the size of a lima bean, tucked between two large sections like a flower pressed in the pages of a thick book. Hungrily picking and plucking at the thistled leaves of an artichoke, down to the translucent purple-tipped petals that flutter thin as gills, down [18.206.238.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:13 GMT) 46 past the nest of buttery fur cropped close like a scrub brush that comes off in sticky clumps, all the way down to the green, sweet creamy heart. ...