Expression

By Emma Margaret

Expression; Part 1, “Sister”

By Emma Margaret.

My hair used to be green, then purple, then pink.

I dyed it’s conformed brown.

Hiding it’s hues in layers of blues,

A formed, not born crown.

Never remaining the same,

It hypnotically appeared soft, angelically crossed.

To adjust to a linear escape would be to hesitate,

As my hair faltered if it halted.

My sister has short hair,

It’s genetically blond, with natural highlights.

It’s soft and it’s healthy,

and she only lets it down after midnights.

Each morning she pins it up and ties it back,

A model twist at a glowing pitch.

Immobile from it’s eldest breath,

It’s perfect and I wish we could switch.

In the stationary days of childhood,

From my seat within our familial bracket.

A vision of knots and tangles, pinned from the outside in,

That I’ll swallow, like the hardest tablet.

What I can see, no one else can,

Her received smiles from perfectly woven turns, truly reflected at all times.

The churning underneath should protrude exterior,

Yet her light hair shines, it twists like it rhymes.

My mother has long hair,

It is dark and the air has left it tarnished.

Mats are familiar from our first encounter, my birth as her daughter,

She does not brush it and it does not get brushed.

She envies the blond of her eldest,

Days spent admiring and curling.

Braiding and intertwining heavy ribbons from her own braids,

Leaving them behind unfurling and twirling.

She mentions once to me, recalling when I was young,

“My synthetic curls were molded from my mother’s braids, pet”.

And she cut it so short but the ribbons still swung,

Latching to her skin when they got wet.

Perhaps from fear of the catching ribbons,

She ties it back now when I see her.

Trying the most to hide her haunting ghost,

She hides her ribbons from the hair they don't prefer.

My hair is grown out now,

The colours have washed and faded.

Yet I brush unbleached strands over my shoulders,

Because they are loose and they’re unbraided.

I’ll go home and pull at the ribbons in my sister’s pinned up hair,

Sometimes they fall from hers and into mine, they curl and they hitch.

But the braids aren't in my hair and the ribbons fall back to her,

It’s inapt but I wish we could switch.

Expression; Part 2, “sister”

By Emma Margaret

The girl’s clothes were fitted and knitted,

Tightened with time and smelt of post-wash pine.

Daily polyester work pants, practical, stable and able,

But clothes stitched from her own hand, is what she’d call ‘mine’.

A standard expression however is perfectly aligned,

An issued gown a perceivable shape society wouldn’t mind.

Yet outgrown seams splitting at home, incited her sewing alone,

Each thread confessing and stressing a road she won’t escape to find.

The sister’s outfits were free and coloured in pleasure,

Sunhats fitted with feathers, hand-picked shells upon her chest.

Skirts brighter than flowers that blossomed the season she was born,

With patterns of paint each a different shape, concealing any stains their very best.

Airport aesthetic, she wore what she pleased,

Sun-kissed yellow summer shirts, crinkled linen pants.

Her sweeping cardigans boasting a messy chestnut mane,

As free as a sapling held airborne lifted up by the wind’s dance.

The sister was tall, quickly outgrew her child attire,

Those days she’d spend her pay before the end of day.

She’d adamantly spree for an online fee that ‘felt more me’,

Parading flowing layers on her body, resenting a then stationary way.

The delicate build of her remaining wispy wardrobe,

Reflecting the fragile essentialness of her fulfilled escape.

The sister resented the lack of colour in her childhood closet,

Refusing to loop, adorning a lilac cape in a sea of black to graduate.

The mother’s dresses were faded with age,

They bore patches and scratches and beer stains.

Overlocked hems fastened her lifelong posture in place,

A dressmaker’s detail, seams to last generations of heavy rains.

She wasn’t told to fold and to keep,

And the dresses were never new or blue.

They were wrinkled and crinkled, unfairly spotted,

Shades of darks and greys, patched without a matching hue.

She was never unaware of the trends,

However she couldn’t help the way she was dressed.

The sister was her second, and she felt her baby resenting,

The girl, as her eldest remained, with a needle and earnestly refrained.

The thinness of her dresses across her attire,

Displayed her inability to let go or move forward.

The mother resented the lack of love in her closet,

Refusing to admit, layering her lavender gowns as a threadbare guard.

Her dresses, timely turning to rags and scraps,

Inherited by the girl to repair the years of despair.

The girl took them in as her maternal aching heirlooms,

She stitched the ribbons of rags to suitable coats with care.

Ultimately the daughter shared a closet with her mother,

The girl folded her work away, ironing her eldest shirts for daily wear.

She tended to the haunting hems of her mother’s dresses, a loving seamstress,

Watching her sister’s childhood closet collect dust in the frame while she remained, there.

By Emma Margaret