I do not know why the selection from The Writers Almanac for Sunday, September 15, 2019 appealed to me so. But it did. It's posted below for you. The photo I have selected to go with it, has no shared thread with the poem. Except that I like it too, and since they have that in common, they are joined here for you.
Cosmetic
by Jim Daniels
Last week my mother had eyebrows tattooed on.
She asks how they look. She’s legally blind—
I could tell her anything.
It’s been raining all day, shame’s mad swirl
circling the house. No more cigarettes, coffee.
No more booze. You’ve got to keep going, I tell her.
I could be Annie in her cute red curls. You can
bet your bottom dollar. Pretty soon I’ll be
tap-dancing on the coffee table, or up in my old room
crying. She’s fingering the earphones of her books-
on-tape machine. She’s been saving up things
to tell me. She ticks them off like the giant
grocery list graffitied to her fridge. I’ve collected
scraps of her old handwriting, the graceful swirls
of confidence. 75 years of good vision. She’s rounding
everything off into simple shapes. I’m staring
at the all-weather eyebrows. A cartoon looking
for the punch line. I run my finger over them.
She startles, then relaxes. It made her sneeze,
my father offers up from the kitchen
where he’s spending a lot more time. Your father
stopped saying ‘Bless you’ pretty fast.
Good. Great. Fantastic. Exquisite. The eyebrows
to top all eyebrows. The king and queen of eyebrow.
Listen to the rain, she says.
Just listen to it coming down.
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