Heavy

My dad won’t call me fat. Not to my face

It’s a small thing that I’ve noticed, his quiet protection of me.

As though the word will write our history in blood. As if it were a secret.

As if its utterance will call down some ancient curse, stretch us all

wide as coast, unravel us into otherness.

When my body becomes predictable dinner conversation, and it will,

I watch him dance around the word with such familiar

grace until he settles, relieved, upon its kind and unobtrusive neighbor.

Heavy, he calls me.

You’re just heavy, princess.

Just a little heavy

And I’ve noticed that he’s right.

I am feeling heavy these days.

Perhaps you can see it stretched full and bloated

between my words, or in the knock of stomach against

microphone stand, maybe you’ve watched me climb steps

and shrugged with gratitude that you did not

have such a towering burden to bear

I am heavy, leadbodied girl.

Carry all my weight in my expectations.

Have hips wide as hope.

Today the scale said I weighed 8,922 pounds

and all but 297 of that is my heart.

I am worldworn, have been asked to

hold more than my fair share

I’m heavy, you know

Heavy things sink

After a lifetime carrying simultaneously the

pity, and the hatred of strangers

Carry well-meaning euphemisms

Carry the wish of my own diminishing

Carry a lifetime of grief wrapped in dimpled skin.

I think It’s time to give some of this back.

Unheavy myself.

First, take this shame.

It does not match this sapling pride, thirsty

for sunlight. Neither does it match my pink

bikini, my naked glory, or all this goddamned audacity

Take every time someone has said “you look

like you’ve lost weight” as if they were saying

“you are finally becoming beautiful”

You can have my 13th year of life, the whole thing

But with it you must take my 18th birthday, when I went down

on my neighbor as he watched tv over my head and I cried myself

to sleep grateful that someone, finally, wanted me

You cannot have my ass. My ass is perfect.

But you can take the excuses given to my female lovers, their

confused faces as I explained why they could not kiss me there,

there where I am afraid, could not suck or swirl or taste

me. You can have all the moments I denied myself their love

You can have all the days I monstered myself into punch-lines.

The time I compared my body to a symphony undone.

How silly, letting someone else tell me what kind of music my

body is supposed to make.

Please take these tears. I do not need them anymore.

Take the morning, or the evening, or the nightmare where

you allowed someone to feed you the definition of beauty

without ever questioning who held the spoon

Take all these iron excuses. This mountain of justifications.

Take all of your thinly veiled health concern and shove it up

your assumptions.

I would offer you myself, in whole. But I know what you would

do with this gorgeous stomach. This stunning double chin.

I know your designs for my brazen outward sprawl, and besides-

I have given you enough

Too many years of hiding

Too many scars.

Too many times I - thank God, mercifully - woke up.

And if you, could pull your eyes away from my body for just – one-

goddamn second

You would see my feet aren’t even touching the ground

They never were

You would see me shed and shed and shed

You would see how high this heavy, heavy girl

Can fly.