Triple Sonnet for Black Hair

My mother warns me not to blow-dry my hair

           too hard, turning it from black to rust, and

I must wear my black hair proudly. Black,

           the color of clothing my grandmother hates,

because young women should always wear red

           or pink, the colors of luck and youth. Black,

the color of wedding dress the reality TV

           starlet circa 2006 wants, but she knows

walking down the aisle in black will break

           her mother’s heart, and fact: red is the color

of wedding dresses in Chinese culture—even

           if the bride wears white for the ceremony,

she’ll change into red for the dinner—hello,

           ten course meal of my dreams that starts

           with a meat platter of roasted pork, and how

guests go crazy for the abalone and swallow’s

           nest soup with crab meat, and of course there’s

a chicken, a pig, a fish, a duck, and a lobster—

           roll call. And fact: at Chinese funerals, relatives

of the deceased don’t wear black, but white.

           And fact: eight’s the lucky Chinese number,

not seven, and at dim sum, my grandmother

           makes sure she orders eight dishes, not seven,

but nine’s alright too. Eight, like the number of

           legs on a spider—a spider, black, like my hair

that my mother warns me not to blow-dry

           too hard, turning it into rust, and I remember

my sixth-grade science experiment of lighting

a cigarette, watching how the smoke changed

           the spider’s web spinning. And black, because

it’s hypnotic, like little black dresses on gorgeous

           women, or how I prefer my lingerie in black

over white, but red is probably the best, an ode

           to sexiness—an ode to the color of my culture

and history, and I want to feel like a million

           dollars—be a million dollars. And black, the color

of my late dog, Buzzie, a Skye Terrier, twice as long

           as he was low, my mother once, joking, said he looked

like a giant rat. Or a licorice bunny. Or a furry snake.

           Or a dragon in some iterations of love, majestic in

dreams—how I miss him after these dream visits,

           black, the color of my wet hair in the morning.