Cut

My grandma hated my dad for being born
with a hare lip so she told him he was lucky.
In Germany, they killed deformed babies ~  
let them bleed to death or something.

When I was still a baby, 
he had plastic surgery.
I could never find any pictures
of him before that.  

When he was drunk 
he told me how kids teased him 
at school, how they stared,
how it made him strong.  

He worked steel, wore a false mustache,
had a wife he knocked up five or six times.
At a high school reunion, they won a candy bowl
for having the most kids first.  He eventually broke 
every knick-knack in the house except it.

I watched him lift weights in the cellar gym, holding 
his breath, stretching that weird lip across his teeth.
Then he stood in front of the mirror, rolling his skin
over the ripply muscles, standing still but shaking,
he'd sweat ~ all those muscles making him strong 
enough to look in the mirror.

One day while he was supposed to be working,
I moved my springy horse Beauty 
into the gym so I could watch myself
in his mirror. I bounced and squealed 
and giggled and bounced until I saw him 
staring at me from a corner of the mirror.
I didn't know what I had done but knew it was bad.  
The skin on the inside of my thighs stuck to Beauty
when he grabbed my wrist to drag me upstairs.

He strapped me to a chair and started cutting
the magical bounce out of my hair.
*What did I do Daddy?  I love you.  Please Daddy, stop.*
The scissors sounded like nagging shink shink shink
He accused me of being vain, 
of thinking I was pretty.
I'd look in the bathroom mirror
at the new me.  
My eyes sweat from staring.

Soon I wanted muscles, 
form,
symmetry, 
definition.



copyright 1994 kathy jo kramer