– Cathy Song
“Look how they love themselves,”
my mother would lectures as we drove through
the ironwoods, the park on one side,
the beach on the other, where sunworshippers,
splayed upon towels, appeared sacrificial,
bodies glazed and glistening like raw fish in the market.
There was folly and irreverence to such exposure,
something only people with dirty feet did.
Who will marry you
if your skin is sunbaked and dried-up like beef jerky?
We put on our hats and gloves
whenever we went for a drive.
When the sun broke through clouds,
my mother sprouted her umbrella.
The body is a temple we worship
secretly in the traveling revivalist tent of our clothes.
The body, hidden, banished to acceptable
rooms of the house, had only a mouth
for eating and a hole for eliminating
what the body rejected: the lower forms of life.
Caramel-colored stools, coiled heavily
like a sleeping python, were a sign
we were living right.
But to erect a statue of the body
and how the body, insolent and defiant
in a bikini, looked was self-indulgent, sun-
worshipping, fad diets and weight-lifting proof
you loved yourself too much.
We were not allowed to love ourselves too much.
So I ate less, and less, and less,
nibbling my way out of meals–
the less I ate, the less
there was of me to love.
I liked it best when standing before the mirror,
I seemed to be disappearing into myself,
breasts sunken into the cavity of my bird-cage chest,
air my true element which fed
in those days of college, snow and brick bound,
the coal fire in my eyes.
No one knew how I truly felt about myself.
Fueled by my own impending disappearance,
I neither slept nor ate, but devoured radiance,
essential as chlorophyll,
the apple’s heated core.
Undetected, I slipped in and out of books,
passages of music, brightly painted rooms
where woven into the signature of voluptuous vines
was the one who flew one day out of the window,
leaving behind an arrangement of cakes and
ornamental flowers;
to weave one’s self, one’s breath, ropes of it, whole
and fully formed, was a way of shining
out of this world.
