New Poetry by James Diaz

Poem in which my mother cuts off all her hair, 

asks for 150 dollars 

See this picture here

it's a wounded deer, it's a scoliosis ghost

sat in wheelchair 

under ER fluorescent light 

I swear I never came from there

but I did 

I did

it's her lamentation - I know - for her mother 

her sackcloth and ashes 

I imagine how she held the scissors 

until my father relented and took them in his hands

and cut it all away;

the pain

it's still there 

only the hair is gone

and her mother 

there's nothing sadder than knowing 

that you can't really fix any of this

how grief, like Samson’s strength, 

was never in the hair

it was just there

just there.

- © James Diaz 2021

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and Poetic Disasters (forthcoming, Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) as well as the founding Editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Cobra Milk Mag, Bear Creek Gazette and Resurrection Mag. They live in a far too cold and snowy upstate New York, where they are waiting patiently for the Spring.