​ Image: “The Blood in the Veins” by Rachel Slotnick. Courtesy of the artist. ​


​​​THE FULL GRACE & MERCY
REBEKAH WOLMAN
​after “The Blood in the Veins” by Rachel Slotnick


Was I ready for a change? Oh, yes. I clipped on
my diamond earrings and rode out Ocean Avenue
on the Muni Metro M Line to the Grace & Mercy

Beauty Salon. I had ridden by and seen that sign
and I was ready, oh so ready, for a change.
They asked me what I wanted and I said Give me

all you’ve got and I got it all, the full service, the full
Grace & Mercy Beauty Treatment. I got my head
blown open with all that Grace and Mercy, all

that Beauty. You know how they say a person
wears her heart on her sleeve—well, I’m wearing
my heart right out there on my new do. I’m so full

of grace and mercy after all that treatment,
I’ve got two hearts now, one of them down low
like a little bun and the other one up high

just kind of floating off the back of my head
and following me, like my grace and mercy have it
in some magnetic hold, like it’s in the orbit

of my beauty. They’re both all red and full
of my life’s blood, just hanging off my head,
and that high-up one has got a boutonnière,

a pink and yellow flower I think they call a glad—
that's short for gladiolus, I know that—
but all this grace and mercy makes me glad,

so glad. My new do is a garden of grace,
it’s a meadow of mercy, it’s a forest
of flowers. I’m sprouting stars out of the back

of my skull and wearing weather like a cloak
around my shoulders. I smell so sweet
with all this grace and mercy that I’m attracting

butterflies. And now I’m on my way
right back out on Ocean Avenue to tell them all
about the treatment I got at that salon.​
Rebekah Wolman is a retired educator living in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. Her work has appeared in Essential Love, an anthology of poems about parents and children, and in The New Verse News, Limp Wrist, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. She is a 2021 winner of Cultural Daily’s Jack Grapes Poetry Prize.  She tweets occasionally @rebekah_wolman.