VENUS
OF MEADOWVIEW
My body was round once,
my stomach an inner tube
in the sea of my pregnancy.
Even my legs inflated
to keep me afloat with child
as I looked down and watched
my breasts drifting from
my center of gravity to
my son's.
Now there is nothing left,
save a few ripples of flesh
and some silver streaks
that emerge when I bathe.
But I remember my belly
floating.
I remember holding onto
it for life.
NUDIST
LADY WITH SWAN SUNGLASSES
I
didn't come to this camp
to
advertise my body,
just
to let it air out
and
loose all its stays.
So
when that swan leapt at me
like
my own tomcat in heat,
I
was annoyed.
But
I can tell you now,
swans
do not sing sweetly
before
they die.
The
sound is more like
a
tire going flat,
or
flatulence.
These
glasses are my trophy.
I
carved them from what was left
of
that swan's bill and bones
after
I got through with him.
They
don't really count
as
clothes.
EARTHENWARE
FERTILITY FIGURE
Breasts
erect with milk
are
firm and hard and burn
when
there is no child to suck
the
fire out of them. They
exaggerate
the clay flesh,
explain
the open mouth
ajar
with labor pains and lead
us
to the eyes, half closed,
caught
in a grimace that
every
woman wants to wear
if
she wants to bear the child
that
will climb out of her belly
and
back on top of it to suck
the
milk right out of the earth
that
forms the human figure.
GREEK
TORSO, 5TH CENTURY B.C.
Even
without the insinuated head,
she
has all the plastic essentials
male
artists have been duplicating
for
two thousand years:
two
breasts separated by a chisel,
the
sculpted mound of a stomach,
and
a line of demarcation at the legs.
Some
man air-brushed the sex
others
since then have been trying
to
flesh out without upstaging the penis.
But
I like how her knees turn in,
compressing
the weight of her thighs,
and
how one breast is smaller.
Felicia Mitchell
"Venus
of Meadowview" and "Nudist
Lady With Swan Sunglasses" first
appeared in
Columbia: A Journal of Literature
and the Arts