Archeologists of the Future Discover the Ultimate Nail Spa

A Poem by Kherry McKay

Archeologists of the Future Discover the Ultimate Nail Spa

At first, it is unclear to them what they’ve unearthed.
Acrylics in two thousand colors. Pearls
and opaques, French fancy, full-set permanent with UV gels,
rhinestone encrusts, scallops, silk wraps and fiberglass
shimmies, simple Chevron French,
nail trimming, shaping, cuticle aromatherapy,
enhancers, hot towels, hot stone message,
aftersoaking, and acrylic afterspray.

Steinbaum ventures the fungus theory, which goes unchallenged
for years. According to it
American women suffered from insidious cuticle fungi:
decorating with acrylics became useful
as well as therapeutic for masking signs of the disease.

New excavations, and Resnick keenly debunks this
a decade later, showing there was art,
even a kind of tentative expressionism.
Photographs of Cher’s nails show up in the journals,
and lofty scholars of several disciplines aver.

There’s a thirty-year lull. Then a young Vanessa Al-Abur
shocks the world with her Nail-Spa-as-Religious-Spirituality-
Cult theory. The academic world spasms and sways, shaken
at its very core. New insights on how nail spas
served as meditative enclaves as well as mental health centers—
DeGrassi does seminal work
on manicures, identity, and labyrinths,
which subsequently invites Post Jungians to speculate on
the symbolism of the lunula and how women confess
to one another

as if under a Full Moon during a subtle baptism of fingers.
Symposiums spring up in 2762
reevaluating the psychodynamics of the 21st century fingernail.

* * *

I’m just a poet who went in, in 2009, to the Ultimate Nail Spa
on Penn Avenue to get change for my bus fare; I had
to get to downtown Pittsburgh to get on food stamps.

They looked at me strangely because I was a man.
As I walked out the door, for some reason
I wished I had gone into academics.