Meditations During my Hair Emergency
Every Wednesday
an hour of my day
is filled
like the bucket
right by my socks
The soap gradually
climbs further
into nailbeds,
the floor
washed in
a weekly
showering
And to make it
all better,
I’m wearing
a hair-mask from
Sephora, from
a kind of
buy-something
get-something-else
sort of deal,
And now this room
is stripped of bad air,
refilled from
all kinds of soap of
floor beneath me
Stripped of a dusting
to make room
as I prepare
to my sanity to roll out
like an overly commanding
carpet, waiting to
be stepped on
and kind of wanting it
to be that way
This kind of removal of
dust and crumbs
would be borderline
excessive anywhere else
but here
And an hour ago
I saw a man
unhoused,
washing somebody
else's car
A car holds
little-to-no
boundaries on where
it can move and
if you don’t believe
me, just look at
the commercials,
Look at the men
rolling through forestry,
framed by the evergreens,
the occasional bear
If I tried to clean off
that mans floors,
it would take a
million hours and a
million buckets and all
the borders
would collapse behind us
If you look behind
the car,
you’ll hear
more and more honking
until the driver
speeds through,
until the bubbles of soap
forfeit clinging onto wrists,
until seasons change
and the floor
turns into ice
ME
IN THE MEDIA (IN FOUR PROSE-POEMS)
1. Stand Up Routine
I’ve often been told that I should write about my mother. She used to write about me. I found her stand-up comedy scripts when I was ten and I’m not sure if I was a bad reader or if she was a bad writer. Hindsight can’t reheat memories burnt into indifference. She had a set where she relished having “mediocre children”, because having a Jesus-like baby would be too hard. Didn’t want the pressure. There was more content about my brother, like how he quit hockey because he didn’t like to sweat. A few years later he ran home crying because a lady tried to grab him into her car in the McDonalds parking lot. He got three blocks away then hid in a bush. He was eleven. That was possible back then. Afterwards he went back to McDonalds and got his fries. Lips salt-rimmed, cheeks swollen. I laughed at the fact he went back. My mother got mad at me and she gave me homework: I needed to work on my sense of humour.
2. On Reddit
When I was sixteen I got involved in some protests. I went semi-viral. I’d look up my own name every night. My favourite thing written about me was a Reddit thread concerned about my width. A man with “gun” in his username wrote no way a biological woman has shoulders that broad. He had a theory about my mother putting silicone in my arms. Then I moved provinces. Then I got recognized from those protests, but only once. By a bar. I said she was wrong, she’s thinking of the wrong guy, that was actually my twin brother who killed himself. I started to believe it. I decided we died in mid-April. I decided it was a pilled-affair. I decided he was real because I said so and that was enough for me. Isn’t that what writing is? He jumps off the balcony when it rains. He says we're going to do a do-over. He’s always trying for a do-over. He’s me but chubbier, more dramatic. I never gave him a name but when I hear my own it sounds like liar liar liar. This is adult make-believe.
3. As It Happens (CBC)
When I was seventeen my mother made her CBC debut. She wrote an op-ed; it impressed. I came along because I’ve always been an off-screen-star. We dressed ourselves up, did our own hair. Taming unbuckles in the face of rain, wind licks curls back into strings. They asked her standard questions and she provided standard answers. Answers orbiting me. She told the camera how after I transitioned she would cry in the shower, so I wouldn’t be afraid of her grief. She thought I’d be harder to love now. On my ninteenth birthday I fucked a man on a Tim Horton’s blanket and decided I would become so loveable it would scare people. I don’t know how to write about sex but I can tell you that the blanket was ugly, the man was mediocre, and somewhere it will always be raining. Man-made or not.
4. On Cable
At nineteen I went out on a date with X. He was from here, knew more than me. We were walking by a climate-change protest and made eye contact with a guy from cable news. He said we had “a look” and interviewed us about the provincial election. X gave responses that sounded correct-enough. I didn’t know any of the political party names so I made things up about the guys from the blue party. They didn’t air much of me, but there’s a clip of us together: him looking at me. He was only looking at me. The start of me being loved was always supposed to be public.
Noah Sparrow is a Montreal-Tiohtià:ke based writer. His chapbook SPECTACLE/SPECTATOR is forthcoming soon with above/ground press, and a second, Here I am Dying at an Average Pace, is forthcoming with Cactus Press in 2026. He won the Gabriel Safdie Poetry Award, was a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2025 International Metatron Poetry Prize. Check out his work in The Fiddlehead, Scrivener Creative Review, or find more at noahsparrow.com
