These are powerful poems about learning to be okay within your body…
From the poem Belly Kisses
…
and vowed that I would not let another person inside me
that hasn’t seen me fully…
a promise I break every time the need to be touched
outweighs the need for dignity.
I am still learning how to ask for what I deserve without it
also sounding like an apology.
…
Settle
So maybe one day I’ll just settle
in a pastel senior citizens’ home
my life reduced to what can fit onto a dresser top,
a lift raft.
Some nice man and I will bond over the side effects of
our blood pressure pills
and then just settle in together like ribs after a deep sigh.
He will absent-mindedly call me by his dead wife’s name.
I will turn down my hearing aids.
He will have the best hard candies in the whole joint.
I will quietly hope to die first so as not to be left again.
His children will politely hate me,
bringing nice though impersonal gifts at Christmas.
It’ll be fine.
Just fine.
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