Paige's Straw Hat

By Jean L. Kreiling

Aliza Nisenbaum b. 1977 Paige’s straw hat, 2024. Oil on linen. 24 x 24 inches. (61 x 61 cm). Exhibitions New York, Aliza Nisenbaum: New Paintings and Drawings, Anton Kern Gallery, May 4th - June 28th, 2024.

I know that hat, although I don’t know Paige.

When I was ten, and not quite at the age

when girls start questioning their style decisions

and every thought is subject to revisions

by peers, I really thought that I was meant

to wear a hat like that. And so I spent

a long-saved dollar at the rummage sale

to buy one. With that hat, a ponytail,

and sunglasses, the image was complete.

My mother’s chuckle was muted, discreet,

and couldn’t sway my sense that this was me—

this cool and worldly personality,

this half-exotic pose in fact no pose

at all. I lacked Paige’s neon-bright clothes,

her full-lipped pout, her darkly made-up eyes,

but even now, in Paige I recognize

my ten-year-old imagined self. But now

I see a little more. The penciled brow,

the studied way Paige leans against her hand,

her sideways glance, the one sleeve dropped as planned,

and yes, the floppy hat—might be disclosing

some doubts. It may be that she’s tired of posing,

and not just for this portrait; she’s been hiding

behind more than that hat. “Cool” is colliding

with what feels more like cold, and she can’t find

the self behind the image she’s designed,

the woman she might have imagined when

she was a girl. She might wish she were ten.

I’m guessing, but that’s what we always do.

And yet at ten I was quite sure I knew

my style, my future; one dollar bought that.

I knew that I was meant to wear that hat.

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Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away (2025). Her work has been awarded the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors.