Throwback Thursday: ‘The Hair in the Bag’ by Jenny Blackford

Exhibit A

‘The Hair in the Bag’ by Jenny Blackford is strange, unsettling, and moving.  Find it in Pulp Literature Issue 15, Summer 2017.  Until the end of November you can pick up a print copy of Issue 15 on sale for $8.

The Hair in the Bag

by Jenny Blackford

She keeps her hair in a drugstore bag
in the boot of the small pink car.

We all get shown it. 



Or perhaps it crawls on its curled blonde tendrils, 

silent as the thin grey cat that shadows her.
We all get shown it. 



The nurses don’t believe her, but see the smoky creature
there under her chair, toying with one golden strand. 

Where will it go,

when there’s no hair left on the pale bone dome?
The plastic bag is two-thirds full of her crowning pride.
We all get shown it.

 

Find this poem and more in Issue 15, Summer 2017, ON SALE now until November 30th!

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Jenny Blackford has an Honours degree with a University Medal and a never-finished PhD in Classics (Greek and Latin). Pamela Sargent called her subversively feminist historical novella set in ancient Greece, The Priestess and the Slave, “elegant.” She won two prizes in the 2016 Sisters in Crime Australia Scarlet Stiletto awards for a murder mystery set in classical Delphi, with water nymphs. Her website is www.jennyblackford.com and she tweets as @dutiesofacat. You can also find her short fiction in the pages of Pulp Literature with ‘The Golden Feather’ from issue 21, Winter 2019.

 

 

Have you got a short poem in you?

Submit it to the Kingfisher Prize for Poetry, open now until November 15th!