Oct. 10, 2022
Audio
Schwarzkopf Reality
By Sage Ravenwood
View full text below.
Schwarzkopf Reality
By Sage Ravenwood
Schwarzkopf color ultime Raven Black 1.1,
Hair dye—black as pitch. Tar thick.
The charred remains of what is left,
what is hidden. Charcoal’s unlit embers.
Closed window, mind-altering fumes,
sing, Wash that gray right out of your hair;
80’s lingo—no respect for age earned locks.
Gray hair on a twenty something father is
DNA panhandled down to his daughter.
Black out hereditary and rinse after 35 minutes.
Dye and water, pooling in the silence
between deafness, fathers, and strangers
spouting societal norms;
staining necklines of old t-shirts,
poverty-rich do-it-yourself salon-tested.
Colonial white dispossession hiding
the truth of my German lineage.
German linguee translated to
dyed black in English. My father’s
translation is a blackened tongue cursing—
how damn much I look like her.
Boost the indigenous/ity of a mother’s
forsaken Pentecostal harness.
No dye can braid that reckoning.
I haven’t earned my heft of scar tissue
denouement from a dad with
a side of hero lacking skills.
I wore removal history in my hair,
braided down my back, fisted in a trap.
Miscreant from birth to his death,
he couldn’t say agitsi—Tsalagi
for my mother. Did you know,
Schwarzkopf is a German nickname
for a person with black hair? He married
his and left a black dyed legacy.
Sage Ravenwood
Sage Ravenwood (she/her) is a deaf Cherokee woman residing in upstate NY with her two rescue dogs, Bjarki and Yazhi, and her one-eyed cat Max. She is an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty and domestic violence. Her work can be found in Glass Poetry - Poets Resist, The Temz Review, Contrary, trampset, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Pioneertown Literary, Grain, Sundress Press anthology - The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry, The Rumpus, Lit Quarterly, PØST, Massachusetts Review, Savant-Garde, ANMLY (Anomaly), River Mouth Review, Native Skin Lit, Santa Clara Review, The Normal School, Pinhole Poetry, UCity Review, Punk Noir, Janus Literary, Jelly Bucket, Colorado Review, Pangyrus, PRISM International, and more.
Image Description: The picture is of Poet Sage Ravenwood, an indigenous woman with long black hair, brown eyes, and high cheekbones, wearing a black t-shirt and black leather jacket. She's wearing long beaded multi-colored seed bead earrings with a diamond frame. The earrings are variegated flowing black, red, turquoise, and white. She's standing in front of a wood-paneled door bordered by light blue walls.