Sam Rose

I cut my own hair

 

I cut my own hair
not because I’m good at it
but because I can
because my hairdresser is always busy
because I’d rather live with a mess
of my own making -
my own creative, unique mess.
I cut my own hair
because I am impatient
and impulsive
I cut my own hair
for the same reasons I draw
not because I’m talented
but because I simply want to
because it is my right and my freedom
to make mayhem if I want to
and because I trust myself
to be able to live with the result.

 

 

Memories of a Catholic Childhood

The coming together of hands
in prayer, falls somewhere along
the spectrum of comfort and peace
as if someone else is there, as if
anyone else can see.

The coming together of hands
in a way that Jesus’s own could not
in the end
are we not all just like we were
when we sat cross-legged on the
wooden floor and before reciting the
words we knew, we would contemplate
whether the thumbs should cross over,
securely folded, or align side by side
and we looked to our peers as they
sat beside us heads bowed, to copy
their finger formations and wonder
whether they were properly praying
or simply waiting for the teacher
to say ‘amen’ and for it all to be over.

The coming together of hands
as if in prayer, but not, just a brief pose
like revisiting the street where we used to live
falls somewhere along the spectrum
of fraudulence and peace,
of childhood and deceit
in the most calming of ways.

 

 

 

Sam Rose is a writer and editor from Northamptonshire, England. She is the editor of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine and The Creative Truth. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines. Sam is a cancer survivor and primarily uses her experiences with this to write poetry and memoir.