The woman in front of me at the post office says
she’s mailing out her granddaughter’s hair. 
 
For pageants, she explains to us all.
She wins wherever she goes with that hair!
 
My grandmother always sent me beanie babies—
what is it like, instead, to get hair? 
 
The only wigs I wore were for Halloween. My mother
did my make-up for studio photos, my hair:
 
one year, Snow White with a craft-store bird
on my finger; another, Rapunzel with all that fake hair
 
in my mouth. A temporary princess, I went home
and washed up, exchanged the wig for my own hair.
 
My mother used to be in pageants—could’ve made me too,
just asked for one day a year. Every month, she dyes her hair
 
white-blonde, the color it was when she was a young girl.
As if a girl is nothing without her hair.
 
I imagine the granddaughter, waiting each day at the mailbox,
her mother waiting each day at the mailbox for that glitzy hair.
 
Maybe the girl is waiting for a box filled with something—
anything other than hair. Maybe she only feels beautiful in that hair.