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Bald
Remember, remember that boy
who could not love you
because you were not pretty,
whose terrible honesty you’ve carried
for thirty years, the truth you mined from him
like some strange gemstone made of your
own desperation that you still wear
around your neck.
And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields
the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,
your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,
beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is
about power. This is about mess. This is what you do
to claim some purchase on this absurd slide
down a hill of talus looking for meaning
or Jesus or some way to make sense.
The boy reminds you as he shifts
to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,
scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray
as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,
like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.
See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.
You can stand it. You already have.
Stand it some more.
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Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology. She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.
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This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.
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Author: Terence Winch
