After a hard day of killing,
his skin flayed with sunburn,
Samson would fall asleep in Delilah's lap
while she brushed the blood from his miles of hair.

She was beautiful as a lost kite.
Kept her own hair short,
cut it every time she lost a lover,
wrung the smell of him out with bleach
and changed its color more often than a spy
so she could keep her grace,
float from room to room unburdened as light,
and she made the moon jealous of the back of her neck.

But in the intimacy of their cups,
bathing themselves in the river of his locks,
she rolled a grape along his sternum,
and asked Samson,
What makes you so strong?

And he whispered,
The days fly away behind us, dead yet alive,
like hair.
Every day we grow a new cell,
and we put our memories there,
a slow film reel of our lives blowing in the wind.
I earned my strength
carrying the crushing length of my whole history
on my head. The weight is almost unbearable,
but now I can dent the executioner's axe with my neck.
If you can hoist the planet of your past above your shoulders,
you can brush away a thousand soldiers
like gnats in the wind
with any bone you find on the ground.

You read my autobiography every time you run your fingers
through my hair, Beloved. Look:
Here, at the tips, I was born.
Here, my childhood fever.
Here, I killed my first snake.
Here, the car crash. The knot where my mother died.
Here I killed my first man, a Philistine.
And see this place, near my ears?
This is where I met you, Beloved.

When I unwrap it after battle,
I can remember everything:
every bee sting and stolen kiss,
every day I fought and lost, or prayed to false gods,
took kindness on the enemy's child,
bowed down to the wicked,
and yes, every single day I have loved you.
Remembering your love is what makes me so strong.

And Samson fell asleep under her fingertips,
as her peculiar kisses landed around his temples,
with a sound like,
Snip,
snip.



This is why I cut my hair short the day I left you.

This is why I turned the scissors on myself.

Why I came home looking like a stranger
and looked at you like a stranger,
too weak to fight anymore.

This is why I call myself Delilah now.

Why I begged the barber to be my surgeon,
to cut away this agonizing weight,
to preserve my heart in his jar of blue alcohol,
to burn the clippings,
as you and I
fell away
onto the checkered floor.