Poetry Friday, Lee Ann Roripaugh

Girl with a Bowl on her Head

When I was a girl, my mother
always made me

wear a wooden bowl on my head.
She wanted to

keep people from looking at me
and it worked. No

one ever really saw me, but
only the bowl,

or what they thought they might have glimpsed
concealed below,

and soon I became secretive
as an acorn.

I cultivated a new way
of seeing and

became a connoisseur of strange,
vegetal things

kept hidden inside--the second
miniature

bell pepper nested inside the first
like a Russian

doll, green, with the intricate curl
and fold of an

ear. Or how the inscrutable
placid carrot

ripening into anarchy
splits wide open

and bares its ropey length of barbed,
thorny spine. Or

the tearing apart of spicy
cool globes of or-

anges to sometimes find an extra
section, the size

of a lima bean, tucked between
two large sections

like a flower pressed in the pages
of a thick book.

Hungrily picking and plucking
at the thistled

leaves of an artichoke, down to
the translucent

purple-tipped petals that flutter
thin as gills, down

past the nest of buttery fur
cropped close like a

scrub brush that comes off in sticky
clumps, all the way

down to the green, sweet creamy heart.


Time to end Brautigan season. (Never fear! He'll be back!) Here's one of my newer favorite poems, because I miss one of my favorite bloggers and because it's an amazing amazing poem.