October 15, 2025

Episode 144: It’s a Big Hair Day!

49 minutes

When Marion pops up on Zoom with her curls blown out to smooth newscaster perfection, it’s a hot topic and one that offers a perfect lead-in to the first poem up for discussion, “Your Hair Wants Cutting” by this episode’s featured poet, Michael Montlack. The three poems we’re considering take inspiration from the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We discuss, Slushies, how much, if any, contextual framing is needed to guide the reader when poems refer to a character who resides in our collective imagination.

We also talk about local and regional idioms, and for Kathy, how difficult they are to unlearn (shout out to Pittsburgh!). Marion accidentally bestows a new nickname on Jason. Dagne has an opinion about how speech is rendered within a poem: italics or quotation marks. She’s team italics, Slushies, which are you? While thinking about the line in these poems; Marion refers to Jason’s excellent essay on the history and theory of the line from his book Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Another poem in the batch has Marion recalling Jason’s poem “Wester.” As always, thanks for listening!

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Lisa Zerkle

Michael Montlack's third poetry collection COSMIC IDIOT will be published by Saturnalia. He is the editor the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe and other magazines. In 2022, his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Contest for LGBTQIA+ poets. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry at NYU and CUNY City College.

https://www.facebook.com/michael.montlack

https://www.instagram.com/michaelmontlack

(website) https://www.michaelmontlack.com/

“Your Hair Wants Cutting”

my grandmother would say, sitting there at her window,

monitoring the restless crows. Her robe nearly as ancient as she.

Since when are you concerned with fashion? I once dared to ask.

I was seventeen, restless as those crows. I knew she wasn’t talking

about my curls. Plumage, she used to call it when I was a boy.

Sit down, little peacock—your hair wants cutting. Even then I knew

it was a cutting remark. Laden. Throwing cold kettle water on my fire.

I reminded myself that she was a widow. And was glad that at least

I would never cause a woman to suffer such grief. I reminded her

how I donned a hat most days. She stared me up and down, her eyes

like the ocean’s green cold. Clever. Your kind seems to have a clever

answer for everything … I swallowed the indictment. Why not make

yourself useful, she said, putting down her tea cup, eyeing the trash

on her tray. I was glad to oblige, happy to depart before she could

notice the low waist of my trousers, let alone the height of my heels.

Muchier

Picture me on a grand terrace, tipping my hat.

Crossing a bridge over the river of defeat—

it’s definitely a state of ascent. Being owed

rather than owing. A blatant triumph against

the conventional. A la Lord Byron. A monocle

without glass, worn for style. It’s an advance

for a memoir about a life you haven’t yet lived.

Bound to be lost on some but admired by all.

Likely absent during the lessons on common

subjects: Algebra, Classic Literature, Biology.

More devoted to the mastery of the quaintest

arts: Porcelain, Calligraphy, Tapestry Weaving,

Drag. As ephemeral and ethereal as a bubble.

It’s not something you adopt. It’s something

that abducts you. Enviers call it utter madness,

but the muchiest of the muchier won’t even

fathom the phrase.

Inheritance

There wasn’t much to leave—my sister,

also suspiciously unwed, took the cottage

and the wagon. But our mother had insisted

that the tea set should be mine. “It’s dainty

and a bit chipped. Like you,” she chortled

on her deathbed. I failed to see the humor

but took it just the same. Knowing my sister

would likely surrender it to the church, where

the nuns might put it to good use but never

appreciate its finery, as that would be vanity.

I much rather hear my motley chums slurp

from it as they sit steeped in my ridiculous

riddles. I never admitted how I crafted them

at night, alone in bed, in the quiet twilight,

the hour I imagined reading bedtime stories

to the children I never had. An apprentice son

would’ve been nice, to hand down millinery

techniques. Instead I had the ghost of one,

there in my workshop, where imaginary fights

erupted over whose turn it was to sweep up

the felt or sharpen the scissors. Of course,

I appeared mad, a much better impression

to leave than the riddle of my bachelorhood.

Sometimes I wanted to smash the porcelain

cups, chuck them at that bloody caterpillar

stinking up the forest with his opium. Why

not? There was no one to inherit my pittance.

No one to be trusted with my legacy… until

the appearance of this girl, at once strange

yet so familiar. I quite liked her. The way

she held her own with me. If ever I had

a daughter, I would have wanted her to be

as brave as she. Defending the poor Knave

of Hearts, accused of stealing the Queen’s

tarts. There in that courtroom, I almost lost

my head but finally found a beneficiary.

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