Three Showers Before Midnight

25 May 2014

In the neighborhood that Mother calls "white trash" the

teenage boys play a game of shirts vs. skins on the 

basketball court adjacent to the playground. We

pass them by in a limp-loping blur of silver minivan,

where I sit in the back seat.

After my second shower of the day I reset my watches to

twelve o'clock midnight and count the minutes with meticulous

precision, I am the conductor of a band---

a one-woman parade.

A woman stuck shrunken between two ballooning hips.

She crawls into the shower again and the attendant turns the gas on high:

It is him to whom she defers and dips her head and says

How may I serve you today, sir.

For how many minutes must she scrub her dead skin cells off before the live ones

fall off too?

Fingernails grown villainously long are

placed on the cutting board and the attendant once more

hacks them off and brushes them onto the floor where

they lie curled in triumphant little smiles.

Between four sterile white walls I take the

razor to my body and watch the hairs like

second hands whirl down the drain in a furious

underwater tornado.

Maybe fourth time's the charm.