Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Reform
 
There in the unabashedly tinseled
shop, the rows of white heads looking
in the window as though they’d
rather be bobbing their foam up and
down the East River in flocks,
the three of us try on wigs. Not
because our bones and bellies are
fried from what they like to
call a kind of therapy, strands of
silk falling from scalp to shoulders
to the floor. Not because our
grandmothers taught us to hide
our kinky skulls: first under scarves,
then under other people’s smoother
bobs and curls, which the signs
hoisted and painted onto the sides
of the buildings that line West 125th
Street shout are made from real
human hair. Not because neon is
our counter-culture, bright moving
spot in a city whose drab insistence
on mourning its purses never
fades. Because we want to know
how they survived, our mothers,
how in the cold of diagnosis and
disenchantment and other people’s
un-belief they kept swimming. How
they taught tiny, brittle children to
want but not to beat their wings
too loud, to make a shelter for their
cake and eat it hushed amid the frost.
 
 
 
 
Second Homecoming
 
Here, under a pernicious sun, the Valle. From the speed
 
devils strumming the narrow highway it is
three roundabouts and a few crops each
 
of wheat and vines to the moment when our
exhaust spilling up the columns of air between
 
their houses starts to thin. Lungs move to expand, but
 
they are not mine. At eleven I watched the skins
of plum tomatoes split, get eaten up by heat
 
and oil in the pan and melt their guts into
a paste that we would use to streak our
 
imaginary faces. Now the valley does the same to us,
 
brimming around our small car, and in its
calm we are already invertebrate. Later from
 
the refuge of tall, boisterous Turin I will
wonder at how we didn’t stay, how the
 
scrawled facsimiles and crumpled pastry were adequate
 
for us to retreat into a city built on the backs of
trams. But then, the small stones dancing
 
between her toes were enough to make
my mother’s father’s mother want to court
 
the sea, seize onto the dregs of fuel oil and forget.
 
 
 
 

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft’s poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in South Dakota Review, Weave Magazine, The Sierra Nevada Review, Word Riot, and PANK; her fiction has appeared in elimae, Gargoyle, and > kill author, among others. Suzanne is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and writes from New York City. You can read more of her writing at suzannemariewrites.com
 
 
 
 
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