that it in fact wouldn’t even save my face, and slowly my fervor
for it died. Stopped watching the videos in which women
would cup their hands into a white basin of water to simulate
their evening routine, to wash their faces of the colored wax
they’d applied to them just for their videos, of their detergents and oils.
Stopped patting the water from the shower into my cheeks,
tapping never pulling, patiently pressing. The cheek
a sunken cheek, the skin a gray corpsish skin. A cheek that
no hydrator can revive. And in the mirror I see a gray corpsish
face, the kind of face that, if found at the foot of a stair
or curled stiffly around the lily mouth of a toilet bowl,
would signal that its owner has ceased to be. Being
old is fine, if no one can tell. But they obviously can. Being
ugly has no particular meaning attached to it
until some other person enters the room. Hard not to
crumble under the gaze, knowing what they see. Or,
thinking I know. No, it is intractable—it is the direction
I’m moving in, intractably. A crepiness that turns
into something you can stick your finger through,
to your horror, and they’re marketing you argan oil.
Lasers. Telling you to roll out the skin under your eyes
with jade. Fuck it. Staring at yourself in the mirror
as you wipe it all on feels more like dying than dying.
Feels as ugly as you feel, feeling your doom as you are.
Looking out from its gelid eye.
