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Untitled
The first time
My mom told me I was fat
Was freshman year of high school.
She clarified,
I weighed as much as my six-foot-tall father.
She stocked the house with diet cola.
She said, “ten pounds would be easy to lose.”
Which wasn’t right…
My father was wasting away, a neurodegenerative disease.
My mother baked chocolate chip cookies twice a week
For my father. After school, I stopped at the supermarket.
Then she said to me, “twenty pounds are doable with a teenage metabolism.”
The doctor prescribed my father chocolate ice cream at every hospital meal.
When I was a senior,
My arm measured the same circumference
As my father’s thighs. I hate that fat and bulky muscle on my arms.
What is so smart about lifting dumbbells?
My father is dead.
All I can think
When I look at my boyfriend’s nakedness is
That he’s impossibly skinny...
Comments
strong poem
I appreciate your posting this intense poem. I am struck by the way you braid the stories of the speaker-mother exchanges and the father's decline and death. The way time passes in the poem is fascinating and the speed of it is striking. Thanks for writing this.