Jim’s barber shop is butter yellow
with a shelf of taxidermy on the wall,
an eider duck at one end
across the too-vast linoleum
from the head of a deer.
A cold wind has got up.
Jim doesn’t talk to the customer
as he cuts a line straight across
the back of his neck. Hair falls on the floor
brown against the last man’s grey,
curling up pointlessly as Jim steps among it.
One barber chair is enough.
The other has accumulated so many magazines
they slide sideways as layers
of carbon do in graphite.
On a notice board are newspaper
clippings of Jim’s customers
holding fish or deer or bears.
It’s a neat bulletin board, nothing strays
outside the frame. A 1957 television set,
once the latest thing, stares out of the wall.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Audrey Henderson’s collection Airstream was shortlisted for the Scotland’s Saltire Society First Book Award. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and her poems have appeared in PN Review, The Dark Horse Magazine, Magma, New Writing Scotland, The Midwest Quarterly and Tar River Poetry. She was a finalist in the Indiana Review 1/2 K Award and won second place in the River Styx International Poetry Contest. She is originally from Scotland where she contributed to BBC Radio Scotland.
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