Jim Daniels

Writer's Almanac published this today and it floored me.

Cosmetic
by Jim Daniels

Last week my mother had eyebrows tattooed on.
She asks how they look. She's legally blind--
I could tell her anything.

It's been raining all day, shame's mad swirl
circling the house. No more cigarettes, coffee.
No more booze. You've got to keep going, I tell her.

I could be Annie in her cute red curls. You can
bet your bottom dollar. Pretty soon I'll be
tap-dancing on the coffee table, or up in my old room

crying. She's fingering the earphones of her books-
on-tape machine. She's been saving up things
to tell me. She ticks them off like the giant

grocery list graffitied to her fridge. I've collected
scraps of her old handwriting, the graceful swirls

of confidence. 75 years of good vision. She's rounding
everything off into simple shapes. I'm staring

at the all-weather eyebrows. A cartoon looking
for the punch line. I run my finger over them.

She startles, then relaxes. It made her sneeze,
my father offers up from the kitchen

where he's spending a lot more time. Your father
stopped saying 'Bless you' pretty fast.

Good. Great. Fantastic. Exquisite. The eyebrows
to top all eyebrows. The king and queen of eyebrow.

Listen to the rain, she says.
Just listen to it coming down.


Jim Daniels, "Cosmetic" from Birth Marks. Copyright © 2013 by Jim Daniels. Used by permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.