Snip Your Hair by Regina DeSalva : American Life in Poetry

The Poetry Foundation

Library of Congress

University of Nebraska
at Lincoln

American Life in Poetry: Column 128

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Our poet this week is 16-year-old Devon Regina DeSalva of Los Angeles, California, who says she wrote this poem to get back at her mother, only to find that her mother loved the poem.

Snip Your Hair

I’ll snip your hair

Cut it all off until you look like a man

I will replace your weight loss bars with bars to make you gain

I will cut your credit cards in half

I will shrink all your clothes

Every trick in the book I will try

I will give all your shoes to the dog

I will do it all

Crazy is where you will be driven

Off a cliff you will want to jump

Then when I am all done

I will look at you with big doughy eyes

And I will say I am sorry

But I have my fingers crossed

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Untangled: Stories & Poems from the Women & Girls of WriteGirl, WriteGirl Publishers, 2006. Poem copyright © 2006 by WriteGirl Publishers and used by permission. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

POEM SEARCH