Aperture

The perfume lady
at the department store
teased and marveled at
my long eyelashes, said they
looked like I’d just come
from the beauty salon.
My smirking aunts held
the word beautiful
to my face like a mirror
or blade. So I balanced
on the sink of my parents’
bathroom, scissors
the distance of a butterfly’s
closed wing from my iris
and snipped. As the lashes
fell, I felt something
                               else
leave me. Marveled
at the guilty
                     hand, now trembling,
attached to my body.

                                    Growth
is a trauma, my mentor in
grad school once told me,
as though violence is a rite
of passage. As though
violence makes possible who
we are meant to become. I argue
with a friend about helicopter-
parenting. The necessity of
hardship to build character,
how much damage I might
cause if I try to protect
my kids from the litanies
of griefs and traumas
I have survived. Did I?

                                         When
I retell the story of my daughter’s
birth, the central image
is the only character that remains
the same each time. I now skip
how close she came
to suffocating on the tangled
umbilical cord, how quickly
her heart rate suddenly
dropped, the way she didn’t
make a sound
                          initially, and
I felt like my pulse
might stop.

                     It’s the moment she
looked up, those familiar
lengthy eyelashes, almost-
cartoonish on a newborn—out of the chaos
of nearly leaving the world
before she entered it, out
of the bright lights and whir
of machines—brushed
my face in a slowed
rhythm until her eyes
closed.

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