"sometimes at 10:37pm you need to change your life" by Sarena Brown

so you do the next best thing
and you cut your hair

you follow a youtube video
and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type
shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements

on your turn you take two ponytails
and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy
and you snip away at your kinda-long hair
until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape

arms overhead
you’re diving

into what no one can say

today was the first day of April
you got rejected from a job opportunity
you remembered it’s your abuser’s birthday

you sit on one friend’s porch and don’t talk about it

you sit on another’s futon and you do

the night wears on
the day folds in on itself and you catch
a glimpse of your body in the toothpasted mirror

arms overhead
you’re picking fruit

we’ve seen this before

in fact we saw you in this exact position three months ago
in a stranger’s bathroom using arts n craft scissors

you saved the hair before immediately losing it

one day sooner or later you might find a bundle of your locks
wrapped up in a sheet of printer paper with November 24th 2024
scrawled on it in green crayon

there is so much you cannot control but you can choose

the crayon
the scissors
the bathroom where you’ll cut our hair the next time you have to do something

and you can choose what you do when that is no longer enough.

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Sarena Brown called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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