To the man in the car who shouted
"I like a big girl in bed, baby. More room to paint on."
I said nothing.
I pretended you meant "paint".
I walked away complemented.
In class, I learn about the tradition of the pastoral landscape.
How it tames the wild out.
That nature is a frenzied horse
most useful after it is broken.
Later, I remember how your thin limbs dangled out of the car.
I remember your mouth, not your own, you said
"Darling, your body is like... a landscape.
The rolling hill of you.
The orchard I would set on fire to match the colour of your mouth."
And for a moment I think you meant it.
Desirability is a clever thief.
It steals you away from your body.
Casts subject as object,
if it means I am wanted.
I know bodies like mine can only be talked about in metaphor.
My stomach could be the curve of a sand dune;
my calves a flexing ocean;
you could hook up with a mountain of a body;
you could describe it later as legs you climbed aaaaall the way up.
But a fat body,
a dirty sidewalk,
is too big to be worthy of a human form.
So when I talk about myself
I describe a landscape,
a skyline,
a galaxy of a woman,
a palatable vastness.
I ask myself if I could be the sun streaking someone else's sky awake?
Desirability means my favourite compliment
came when a man told me that my mouth
reminded him of a jar of fireflies on a hot southern night.
I grew up in Portland.
[ audience laughs and cheers]
I have no idea what a jar of fireflies feels like.
But I bet you it's beautiful like the paintings.
Something you can hang up and show off to strangers,
say this piece shows that nature is a frenzied swarm,
but god damn, how pretty the jar tames it.
There are days the body positivity movement does not prepare you for.
Like the day you have to take your body back
from the only way people allow themselves to find it beautiful.
To say that my mouth?
Does not firefly.
My body?
Is not a landscape.
I. Am not. A fucking orchard.
Or a crate of bruised fruit on the road you stop at,
on the way to some beautiful hillside with curves in aaaall the right places.
My body is goooood.
Like. A body.
I take up
this
much.
space.
I'm not some sprawling. thing. in the distance.
I am right here!
I.
Am right.
Here.
[audience cheers]