The first step taken in this project was to read Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion. The intimacy of such a word draws readers in immediately, and the personal nature of the poem—the self-esteem issues that come with having fat compels them to read the poem as if it were a friend or sibling mourning their body. I returned to the form again and again to create what I believe are three of the strongest poems in my collection: "In My Closet".
In "Ode to the Otter Pop" I used a lot of alliteration ("Sweet summer syrup/sticky nectar", "Arctic aisle aborigine") and short lines to speed up the poem. Over the past four years I have been privileged to meet some of the most acclaimed writers this country has to offer. They had been tied down by extended stanzas and overly expository lines that I had enjoyed writing—and still enjoy reading—but were a detriment to the overall success of the poem.
A non-comprehensive list of the things I don't like about my body" retained none of its original self. In the end, one half of the poem became very similar in nature to "Belly Fat" - an ode to the body I couldn't get myself to love This was one of the earliest poems I wrote for this collection and one of the last poems I revised.
It is the duty of the artist to both accept this inevitability and to be angry against it, always.
AM
I never told him to fly, but the bricks they spoke and said that I am the sparrow and the city will find. I'll teach you how to breathe fire and we'll get drunk on absinthe from moonlight and sea salt. Her boys, hands like bear-shaped honey bottles, cling to the Hershey-stamped candies placed below the lids—.
You've never met a body like that, except you have - every day on the bus, in the school yard, behind McDonald's. If you want to fuck in the Disney World parking lot, let it happen. Maybe this is the reason, maybe this is the reason: I want to tell you that I bought.
I never put my tongue to the dragon before Vietnam, nor did I ever let bleach touch my teeth, but in that kitchen I did anything anyone asked of me, so while my teeth were still rich with angel Why the hell are we awake at four in the morning (on a bus in Vietnam). Outside, in the semi-darkness, old women and one old man stood like an open palm.
Air conditioners remind me of Memphis in January, long gray sidewalks that act as bridges between neighborhoods, like walking through a pop-up book where one side is two frozen yogurt places next to a hot yoga studio and the next is a chain a fence with sagging holes and seven nurseries, all bearing the same copyrighted image of Dora the Explorer on their unwashed shutters. He twists her forward and pulls the straps up each arm until her body is in the cage and I realize this is a technique all women know. A year later, I have prayer meetings in the shower and in the coffee shop, on my knees in the water asking for that good blood that all my friends already know, asking for puffy breasts and rounded hips - I think I know what a woman is.
There's a party and I've just graduated, so I find the shorts my mom doesn't know about and the jacket a gay boy gave me and wear them with the intention of giving, but less than I know. She strokes the hair on my vagina because it's now a vagina and not a crotch or a crotch or a private part and she hasn't been in a long time, she looks at my breasts like they're Disney princesses and I smiling and explaining what I can as best I can until she loses interest and we climb into the bath water that runs high with tug boats and Barbies.
GOING
A needle squealing under your skin to the forest, already there you are a hybrid thing made of soil and blood and it is the pain that says that what you are is not what you should be, moist starfish tongue slurps the juice from your first coat of semi-opaque whiteness and leaves a throbbing like a Ford with a fan belt problem rattling and your mother's voice. When you're a girl who walks in the dirt and I'm a girl who walks in the dirt, you learn to stay inside when it rains, or you learn to love mud on your feet, or you learn where they sell shoes for the walk. If they find me here walking in the dirt and walking in the rain, tell them be careful, tell them stickers grow here.
WRITE
Is there a word for the twelfth floor delirium that comes when you see the line between sky where the rain starts. Or a word for the gut that does jumping jacks in your stomach when the plane lands and fixes the world. Is it tart or bitter or sweet like sugar-dipped strawberries on Sundays in the South.
In Vietnam, she says the dress will be red, trimmed with gold beads and embroidered cranes, their knees bent and wings always spread. Finally we reach where we're going, me to the drop-off zone at Kennedy International, her to a place I can't follow. It is we, the scholars, who built our memories out of sticks in the backyard and the garbage bags in our living room that hold what was someone else's clothes, we who are now grown and recreate our lives for the sake of the unborn who will never always eat cold food like us.
Your green beans and sweet corn won't be canned, your blue jeans won't be pre-dyed unless you want them to be, you won't suffocate in the smell of moldy laundry and dollar shampoo, and the dogs won't shy away your house looks like a lost brother who wears the same thinness and hungry fleas and collar that you wear. We'll take trips to the coast or to the mountains and you'll know what a plane is before you're twenty, and no one will make fun of you when you eat your food and drink your drinks because you won't choke it like you do not fight a share. Mum won't work a double shift and daddy won't work a night shift and the word factory will be something you only know about from picture books.
We'll give you pink satin dolls and cold buckets of ice cream, and when winter comes there'll be a fireplace smelling of logs and smoke, and we'll ash all those things that stuck through the mattress and into our arms until they bled years ago. At the end of my days, when you stand before the congregation, wearing a black and half-formed smile, a hastily written eulogy clutched in your hand, look at the crowd, at all those I have left behind, and tell them. In My Closet: a quilt, a cup, an obituary, price tags and two photos of my sister.
What hands were these that knew the colors of the world and put them in a blanket for a granddaughter, not once, but twice, and then three times again, her red and white fingers making red and white squares made, and the forms have a suffering of their own until she could say it is the blanket of her days and she passes. I walked a hard path to her and my blankets on the living room floor where the dust accumulated and became an allergen pile.
