Cold wave
by Patria Rivera

Aunt Ursula weaned us from twirling

our hair in katuray twigs, the aunt who went

to beauty culture school to learn how

to lacquer nails in moon shapes. She lined

her brows in high thin pencil arcs,

painted a fan of colors on the tiny space

above her eyes. To us who lived each day in amazement,

she was our homecoming queen,

the one who went away,

the one who took the world, its textures and shapes,

brought it back in a box

of rubber and plastic curlers,

neutralizers, chemicals that bobbed our hair

in a permanent wave.

Soon we grew, and her many suitors pared down

to the suitable one, the farmer she married and had many

children with. She thought she would live her life

like the stories she read,

like those who’ve inherited the earth,

not a litany of hard times when the farms didn’t yield

enough for farmwives to have their hair curled.

She plodded on, but the shiver of a plague came

and took her in a swelling heave.

My aunt wasted away—

fast, as if pressing the edges of her life

would allow the wave of cold comfort

to follow her world’s short drift.


© Patria Rivera