Dying Hair

by Darlene Young

Leaning over the bathtub

rinsing the dye out of my hair,

I notice that the droplets splattered on the porcelain

look like blood.

It reminds me of my mother,

whose death had nothing to do with blood

or bathtubs or hair-dye,

but who had always prided herself

on not coloring her hair:

“It crosses the line into vanity,”

she would say.


She lost her salty hair to chemo.

But by the time she died it had grown back,

softer, richer, darker than it was before,

as if her body had decided not

to waste time going gray again,

or fate had granted one small graceful

compensation at the end,

a last reminder in her pale and fading life

of the woman she had been.

Darlene is trying to survive the winter in South Jordan, Utah, where she lives with the six men in her life (one is a husband and one is a cat). She hopes to return to school for an MFA someday, but meanwhile enjoys working on her novel and reading to her kids.