By Susan Anmuth
PROMPT — If only ...
I want to not be fat.
But I want to not be restricted
and obsessed
and deprived
and guilty
and ashamed
about food any
more.
What if the hours I’ve consumed
with diets, food plans, new bright starts,
still missing the mud pie at Henry’s End
in Brooklyn Heights
that no one would order so I couldn’t have a bite without getting
my own and I disciplinately didn’t,
four decades ago,
were applied instead to
curing cancer or
discovering a new color or
staring blankly
at the wall (still a better use of time)?
What if I could let slide the narrow, bourgeois model of female beauty
and truly not hate my upper arms?
Here I am mobile
When people like my ex-husband get strokes and cancer and die.
Here I am still working, and fighting to unionize Super Store,
Never dreaming of
retiring from revolution.
Here I am checking no boxes during the annual physical:
blood pressure,
kidney,
heart,
all the things that can go wrong,
owning a reproductive system that no longer works
but isn’t built to work when
you’re 70
so in that sense works.
I desperately want to not care or, better,
appreciate the body I live in with my
gravity-driven boobs
and jowly jowls
and the big ass I’ve had all along.
You need a support community to be strong against isms:
Racism
Sexism
Homophobia
Anti-transgenderism
Discrimination against people with disabilities
In the case of fat,
to de-internalize all the ads in all the magazines
and all the TV shows
and all the movies and please gods.
All the magic bullet solutions which siren
me every time I open my PC.
Even the fat good actors, like Melissa McCarthy and John Goodman
get thin,
Except for Tony Soprano and he died.
Gandolfino I mean. Probably Tony too but
David Chase remains coy.
Susan Anmuth lives with her son, Yorkie, and cat in the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, an area with many ethnic supermarkets and coffee shops.