Residue

My seafoam hair comes out in clumps, tangled strands

winding around my fingers every time I brush back my bangs

or twirl dry and splitting curls. I am used to it now, dropping

handfuls everywhere I go. I am on the floorboards of my car,

the walls of the shower. I am skidding across park benches, woven

into birds’ nests. I left bits of me scattered throughout North Carolina,

littering myself all over Charlotte. I am lying on a hotel bed in Arkansas,

then another in New Mexico, intertwined in the ridges of Californian tires,

blocking intersections. I am floating along sandy mountains, hovering

in smoke from campfires and weed until I am licked by a flame and the

smell of burnt hair makes me sick. I ride up the Morongo Basin

on the back of a coyote, but am thrown in the air when it attacks a mother

jackrabbit. I avert my eyes and watch the clouds get slowly further away

as I fall and land in front of her babies who are watching, horrified,

from behind a cracked grey boulder. I want to comfort them, but the wind

picks me up and hurls me toward the coast, and I hit the ocean without a

splash. I sit on the waves and try to enjoy the rise and fall, when a seagull

appears above me. He flaps his wings and cocks his head and snatches me

up in his beak before flying back to the shore to show his friends. I am

placed on the sand and seven of them stare at me, occasionally pecking

at me until I am no longer

one solid strand, but broken into pieces short as cat hair. They get bored

and fly away, scattering my small pieces in their take off. I burrow

in the sand and cry out for my shell, but there is no reply. I wait

for two days before I realize there is simply no body to come back to.