1

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

-- a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or

voice of the freeway. Night after night, metal streaming downcoast,

past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires

THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes

dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand

in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,

Malathion in the throat, communion,

the hospital at the edge of the fields,

premature slipping from unsafe wombs,

the labor and delivery nurse on her break  watching

planes dusting rows old pickers.

Elsewhere declarations are made:  at the sink

rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market

one says: “On the pond this evening is a light

finer than my mother’s handkerchief

received from her mother, hemmed and initialed

by the nuns in Belgium.”

One says:    “I can lie for hours

reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.

I’d rather lie awake and read.”   One writes:

“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks

in this cabin’s walls, the road

in winter is often impassable,

I live here so I don’t have to go out and act,

I’m trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing.”

One says: “I never knew from one day to the next

where it was coming from:  I had to make my life happen

from day to day.  Every day an emergency.

Now I have a house, a job from year to year.

What does that make me?”

   ::       ::          ::        ::          

I was born a month early. I weighed five pounds.

The doctor said, “If she loses weight we’ll put her in the incubator for a few days but if she gains weight, she can go home.”

He never told me when to stop.

It’s a true story. But the joke is mine.

It’s something that you learn when you are a fat kid. Make the joke before anyone else can. Then maybe they’ll leave you alone. Or, if you’re funny enough, and you make them laugh enough, they may even be your friend. Which is nice of them since they have to endure the embarrassment of being seen with you.

If you don’t make the joke you’re one of the kids who runs home. Trying to stay away from the boys who poke at your legs with sticks. You pile onto your bed. A lump. You squeeze into yourself and you cry.

The first thing, before I could even inhale and exhale they decided my weight was an issue.

Welcome to the difficult world.

Within two miles of the Pacific rounding

this long bay, sheening the light for miles

inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over

strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind

returning to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with

ever-changing words, always the same language

--- this is where I live now.    If you had known me

once, you’d still know me now though in a different

light and life.   This is no place you ever knew me.

                     ::  ::  ::  ::  ::  ::  ::

When I cannot endure the self I have created, I move. I look to geography for salvation. I adopt a culture.

For a while I wore hip hugging blue jeans and tye-dyed t-shirts, work boots and never a bra or underwear. For a while I wore Levies and Tony Llamas and embroidered cowboy shirts. And sometimes a Stenson. I wore long drawstring calico skirts and Birkenstocks and had my head shaved by a holy man on a riverbank. I wore black pants and black shirts and black boots and black socks and black underwear and a black bra and I never went above Fourteenth Street.

But the pressure would build and I’d go somewhere else and change my uniform.

I thought: maybe the mountains and so I went there and I stood at my window and marveled at how many stars were visible. I walked over rocks. My skin got dry. My lungs pulled at the oxygen thin air.

I thought: maybe the city. And I walked faster and faster through the crowds because I learned where I was going and exactly how to get there and the fastest way to get there. And I looked at the full moon night and stopped walking. I stood just a few feet away from the row of cardboard houses against the black metal fence and I was there but I wasn’t making it.

I thought: maybe the bay.

This is where you think you know me now.

But no geography has closed around me. All uniforms begin to itch. My body is still the same.

I think: maybe a small town in the middle.

Or the smaller city I rejected.

Or nearer to my mother. She’s older now.

I wonder if this is a white mans madness,

I honor your feelings and leave it at that.

I was worried about people of Arab decent and those who looked as if they might be. Stories were circulating daily about hate crimes, an old man in Oakland had been attacked, mosques were vandalized.

My mother asked, “ Are there any Muslims at your school?”

“Yes mom. I know some Muslims.”

“ Well, just be nice to them.”

She meant, be afraid. Don’t antagonize. They can’t be trusted. But I wanted to be nice. I wanted to be clear that I did not assume or project anything about them.

I was sitting at a table on the patio because I was smoking. I smoke when I am sad, or angry. I smoke when I feel helpless.

A young woman with almond skin and long black hair was walking toward me. Except for the logo loyal generic clothing she wore, she looked like a person from any number of Arab countries. I smiled a welcome.

“ I thought you might be interested in this.” She said sweetly and she handed me an orange flyer. It was an advertisement for an MLM company with a health kit, AKA diet plan. In a corner text box a name and telephone number had been hand written. I imagine it was hers.

“ Oh. No. No thank you” I tried to sound as sweet as she had.

She nodded and walked away.

No worries about assumptions or projections. I was fat. I must be interested in a diet product. I must not know that I can lose weight. I must not have tried.

There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Approaching a total stranger and suggesting that they change an attribute of their physicality, that’s OK. She was just worried about my health.

I pulled deeply at the end of my smoke and hissed the exhale through my nose. 

XII

What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

from inside out, executing the blue prints of resistance and mercy

drawn up in childhood, in that little girl, round-faced with

                       clenched fists, already acquainted with morning

in the creased snapshots you gave me?   What homage will be

                           paid to beauty

that insists on speaking truth, knows the two are not always the

                        same

beauty that won’t deny, is itself an eye, will not rest under

                        contemplation?

               ::          ::          ::         ::

Sunday, after the fat women’s swim, I adopt my locker room vision. I keep my eyes focused on the shower handle, my clothing, my image in the mirror. But I see them out of the corner of my eyes. Rounded forms, rippled flesh, they are drying themselves, laughing, making plans to go to lunch.

I remember my mother’s body while she changed her cloths. I remember it in stages, ageing, a new vein popped out on a calf, a scar raised along the back of a knee. Her belly rose and fell with each diet trend. It was my mother’s body. I never thought about it in terms of beauty. It just was the geography of her life.

I am taller. I am broader. I lean down now when I kiss her goodbye. But sometimes I smell like her. My fingers look like hers.

When I was twelve I did my first diet. I stood in front of the mirror in our hall and sucked in my stomach. I arched my back and admired my breasts. I had the power of youth. I was beauty.  Now I have scars, and veins and geography of my own.

I look around the locker room.

Beauty will not rest.