Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Frieda Kahlos’ Eyebrows, poems by Anne McDonald.
Frieda Kahlos’ Eyebrows
I wish I had Frieda Kahlos’ eyebrows.
Well, maybe not the brows,
but the balls to wear a line of hair
across my face.
To dress in flowers and lace,
to paint my portrait with cockatoos,
never worrying who thought it was unsightly.
I wish I knew how to wear a jet black unibrow lightly,
a thick black line between my eyes that says
look at me.
In the 18th century, would I have had the front
to wear, like other ladies, eyebrows made
from mouses’ hair, attached with glue made from fish,
when my own fell off due to lead
in my foundation?
Would I worry about what people said?
Even now, I feel sorry for the mice,
killed and skinned, sliced into arches
so we could look nice.
But I have only poet’s eyebrows,
the same mousy colour of my hair,
nothing that would make a stranger stare,
or draw attention from a man on a galloping horse.
Of course, they had their heyday in the seventies,
when a thin arched line was all the rage,
painted over blue pastel eyeshadow
bought from the Avon Lady.
Maybe, if truth be told, for all our shaping,
tinting, plucking, dyeing, we are lying to ourselves
if we think we can outdo Frieda.
If I end up in a nursing home,
now knowing who I am or why I’m there,
I hope I’ve found the guts somehow,
to grow a Frieda unibrow.
The Kid On CNN
My dad is not a bad man, but he is sick.
Because he is sick, I know he is dangerous
I am telling you he’s about to do something bad
but my dad is not a bad man.
I’m afraid of what my dad will do
now that I have told the world that he is bad.
I had to let someone know,
he told me he was going to go, was going
to do something big, something bad.
So I told, I called the cops
I stayed on hold and gave my name
the same as his, Reffit, Guy,
a man who, up to now, was the same
as you or I until things changed.
On November 8, four years ago
I was a teenager in high school
and I thought my dad was kinda cool.
But he, a normal kinda guy became unhinged,
deranged, eighty-seven percent father,
worker, brother, son, husband,
three percent dangerous and unpredictable.
Radicalized in a white man’s army, paranoid
far right remnants of a segregation era.
The fear of what he could, or would do,
made me sick.
So I, his son, called the FBI, said I don’t know why
but this man is not the dad I know and I’m afraid,
for me, for him, for anyone who carries a gun
into the capitol building.
Four years ago my dad was not a bad man,
he was just my dad.
Now because of me, the world can see
what he has become.
I heard the cries of disbelief and despair,
smelled the chaos in the air from our living room.
Then, I became not his son but the “kid on CNN.”
Four years ago, my dad was not a bad man.
© Anne McDonald
Anne McDonald is a spoken word poet, creative writing teacher and festival curator. Her work is centered on the challenges we face in a society that is changing rapidly and how we respond or react to those changes. Through her writing she explores themes of parenthood, aging, death, loss, inclusion and response to the human condition. She was awarded The Irish Writers Residency in Cill Rialag, Kerry and The John Hewitt residency. She has had work published in Women’s News, Hot Press, Electric Acorn, Woman’s Work Anthologies 1 & 2, The Blue Nib, The Strokestown Anthology, Boyne Berries, The Pendemic, The Waxed Lemon, The Storms Inaugural Issue, Fragments Of Time, Blue Mondays’ Anthology 2021, 192 Magazine, Crow Name and several issues of Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. Her work has also been featured on collaborations with musicians and animators and reviewed and broadcast on RTE Radio. Her first collection of poetry Crow’s Books was published in 2020 and her second collection, Clothespeg in my Pocket, will be published in 2025. Her collaborative short film was shortlisted for the Drumshanbo International poetry film festival 2024.