MAYHEM
Issue Two – November 2014
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
Gaia Church
Eight ways to look at a fat little girl
Six.
Strawberry cheeks, thick legs,
Wide belly, strong heart.
Second serving, dark glances,
Moment on the lips.
Lifetimes on the hips.
Eight.
Ursula.
Madam Mim.
Queen of Hearts.
A realisation that
good voices
don’t spawn
from wide bodies and wiggly chins.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
MAYHEM
Issue Two – November 2014
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
Eleven.
PE changing room.
Whispers behind pimpled cheeks
with valleys between their hipbones,
Archway armpits,
Wishbone thighs.
But her:
Mountainous stomach,
Rock knuckles,
Log legs.
Thirteen.
Long hair that her mother likes.
Hiding booming breasts
and swelling guts.
Picking at the ends,
forcing them apart,
wishing it was limb from limb,
fat from bone,
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
Issue Two – November 2014
MAYHEM
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
ripping her body at the seams.
Fifteen.
Long sleeves.
Loose sweats.
Bloody train tracks
carved into chubby wrists
by metal shards.
The meticulous art of self-hate
coached by parents
from whom she inherited the brush
to paint her body
into the backdrop
and disappear.
Seventeen.
A boy calls her beautiful.
She asks, “Why?”
Exclamations of inner beauty
cannot quell
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
MAYHEM
Issue Two – November 2014
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
the rising tides of shame.
Nineteen.
Wondering why
out of all of the words that one can be
that fat
is worse
than selfish
vain
boring
malicious.
That by being more
a woman is less.
Twenty-One.
Sick of shrinking to fit.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author