Lice
By Samantha Thornhill

First day in an American school,
I imagined Ms. Benvenuti’s dark
Italian hair on my head, wished

the hair down to my knees.
She introduced the class to me
and they went right back to cutting

whatever they were cutting.
I thought it strange, the white lady
floating from one head to the next—

parting curtains
of hair and scratching scalps
with the tip of a ballpoint pen.

They didn’t seem to notice her
either. The lady didn’t tap me
with her blue wand;

I didn’t mind. Ms. Benvenuti
seated me next to an Indian girl
and said she was from Trinidad too.

I said hi. Her eyelashes were so long
I thought they would fly away.
Hi, she said and went back to cutting.

She didn’t sound like home.

Copyright © Samantha Thornhill, used with permission of the author.

Trinidadian-born Samantha Thornhill started writing poetry at age eleven and edited her high school literary magazine. A graduate of Florida State University (B.A. in Creative Writing), and the University of Virginia (M.F.A. in Poetry), she coached the Virginia Slam Poetry team for two years, and is a member of Black on Black Rhyme. For several years, Samantha served as a program director at the Children’s Aid Society in East Harlem, where she built and nurtured youth development programs. Samantha currently teaches poetry to first year acting students in the Drama division at the Juilliard School. The author of the young adult novel, Seventeen Seasons, forthcoming from Penguin Books, she lives in Brooklyn.

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