each man’s version of reality

is played out

as a love story

a drama

a comedy

a horror story

depending on …..

the mentality and demeanour

of the woman of the house

by drax

Fat Women Never

Fat Women never walk across the sand

without leaving footprints.

Fat Women never slip away unseen.
Fat Women get noticed.
Fat Women leave their mark.
Fat Women never run without moving
as some women run without moving
with bodies held as firmly immobile
as cardboard paper dolls once promised.
At one time, Fat Women might have been sorry
to realize the best clothes were reserved
for women built like paper dolls
Tabs folding behind their hard, flat
arms and waists, belting them in.
At one time, Thin Women might have been sorry
to see Fat Women moving
to see how the sea moves under their skin
unhushed waves of dancing
(thigh, butt, hip, belly, breast and chin)
as if jitterbugging to internal rhythms
as if laughing at a joke others didn't get
as if remembering a round and perfect world
(hills, dunes and uneven flowing ground).
Imagine the sadness of cardboard women
whose bodies are held too still
to jitterbug or laugh or remember.
Imagine the sadness looks like anger.
Imagine the sadness looks like fear.
Imagine what they have shaved off
(figures, food, years, life and self)
to fit into the paper dresses
that Fat Women will never fit in.

G.L. Morrison, 2007

Have you ever noticed how poems about fat girls are sexy? All that talk of curves and suavity can't help but get your pen following gravity to where flesh gathers and unfurls like summer ferns. Skinny girls are not built to carry the fullness of love sonnets. How many odes to her minuscule breasts, her arms like salad tongs, her throat as fine as a picture hook have you read? It's the softness that enraptures writers, that sense of abundance: fifty richly-textured words for plenty dripping from our fingers, staining the paper translucent as we scrawl.

The camera is another story. It craves angles, the round of the lens hankering a counterbalance in splint-thin women, hair pulled tight enough to skeletonize, sparing just the jagged cliffs of cheeks and lashes to color, then move onto the sound stage. There's something about fat that is too human; it humiliates the technology -- metal tripods and sharpened lights feel their own glare and strike back.

We ought to craft self-defense classes for ample girls: combat training for the telephotophobic. In armies of oversized flak jackets we'd march into the studios, smash optical fiber and looking glasses, crash through sound-proof screening rooms. Then, stripping to our swimsuits we'd stride to the library, decanting poetry from gallon jugs and drinking ourselves in.

Sharon Wachsler

the_fat_lady