Grandma Bea Brushing Her Hair Poem by Leah Browning

After a night out dancing, she unwound
her hair from its bun, letting bobby pins
clatter into a white dish with a rose
hand-painted in the center. The dish
was thick and clumsy, with the pinch-marks
of my fingers still visible under the glaze,
and the rose no more than a swipe of red paint.

In the dark, though, it matched the long elegance
of her arm, raised to reach the back of her head.
She wore a long white slip, ghostly in the moonlight,
as she stood before the only full-length mirror
in the house and bent at the waist, brushing her hair
from top to bottom, first the back and then the front of it.
I lay in bed, holding my breath, pretending to sleep.

By the time she got to the nursing home, we kept her
dancing shoes in the hall closet under a coat of dust.
On washing days, the patients were lined up in the hall
in their wheelchairs, like cars waiting for oil. Her hair
had been cut short, in a choppy gray bob, because the hands
resting on the arms of her wheelchair were twisted
arthritically, knobs of bone layered under ropy purple veins,

and she no longer knew where to find
the bottle of cream rinse
or her favorite tortoiseshell combs.