Mortuary Cosmetology (Round 2)
Let's workshop this poem about a woman who seems to misunderstand how dark she really is throughout her life, which leads to a silver lining during her open-casket wake
Mortuary Cosmetology Video footage set in the ambient music of her wake revealed, beneath occasional shaky static, a woman no doubt—by her neck—black. But having a mom (a whitexican devotee of nighttime bleach cream) who conflated beauty and fairness; having no one around as a kid sharing her “unruly” hair—all that had to factor in to her greyish cast. Was it enabled further by the wishful thought that her complexion did not descend down so deep to the caramel tone an uncle once said she was? Or was she not deluded about her look, and simply gave in to it on grounds that ashen at least beats “going native?” By chance, perhaps she never saw herself in midmorning light but only in mirrors glared by severe fluorescence. Could there have been undiagnosed deuteranopia? Whatever the story, her entire short life she wore— overdid—liquid foundation several shades too light (too pink as well, technically, for the undertones, warm, of someone with veins more green than blue). Yes, in the identity upheavals of undergrad years, perhaps as an homage to the voice of a dad missing from memory, her known joy of box braids—silver, especially—bloomed from types her mom avoided: black-soaped, shea-buttered, Amanis and Leshawns strutting on step teams call-and-response rhythms synced purple and green, laughter teeth so white in their contagious clowning and roasting (“Gurrl . . . them shoes are ti-yerd!").—Yet despite that period, she turned out to be one of few Americans who— despite her family outsourcing full preparation of her body to strangers (like all good Americans)— turned out to look exactly like herself in the casket. No one had the instinct to scream “That is not her!” Wake lilies framed that well-known jawline divide all-too-stark, as if her own hand were behind it— from heaven flouting cosmetology’s rule: less is more. And so she reposed as in life with that extra layer, dead—as if from a face transplant not quite set.
