My mother sighed, women pay 

Ivy Raff

hundreds of dollars for hair like yours. She’s paid

thousands of dollars for hair like mine. Thirty years

of lye behind her. She started to dye at the first gray.

I’d wait in the vinyl chairs at Irma’s Salon, watch

the eponymous artist stick little aluminum squares

to my mother’s head, snap on gloves to guard her own

skin from the toxins. Paint strawberry blonde

onto my mother.

The whole left side of my head is gray now. I’m several years

older than my mother was when I kicked my feet off the edge

of Irma’s vinyl chair. Marlene cuts my hair. Twirls a finger in my

gray streak. Squeals, oooh, sparkly! Always I’ve loved my hair.

Keratin, already dead by its nature, keeps pace with me

as I live.

Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains / Qué queda (bilingual English/Spanish edition, Editorial DALYA forthcoming 2024), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.” Individual poems appear in Ninth Letter, ONE ART, The American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Nimrod International Journal, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, as well as in the anthologies Spectrum: Poetry Celebrating Identity, Kinship: Poems on Belonging (Renard Press, 2022 & 2023), London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell's Senior Systems Project Manager and as a member of Seventh Wave Magazine’s editorial team, and sits on the board of Houston’s Colectiva Feminista Colibri. As a Jewish artist and a human, she advocates for a free Palestine.