jem zero

strangled by my own deliciousness

fat is delicious when it is not on a person
i want to be delicious

my rolls are delectable, buttered in sweat and heat rash
my squish, an amusement park of ups and downs and hills and
a sharp drop

when i realize i don’t fit into my favourite dress anymore

i love being fat until my wallet can’t buy a size up in leggings
maybe two sizes because depression hits like a drunken schoolbus
and it takes you out of the game like getting an F in gym class

i am fat even when you call me unhealthy
i am unhealthy even when the pounds melt away into dislocated bones
my muscles an atrophied matryoshka doll
each one smaller and weaker than the next until i hit helpless
an infant unable to lift its own head

there are studies about how baby fat is healthy
and adult fat is revulsion, fried and speared with a stick
there are studies about how shame and humiliation do not help anyone
with what they call a weight loss

“journey”

like hating your body is a path of growth, like living while fat
is a crime you are trying to atone for

the only time i’ve wanted to be less fat was when i took economics
and learned about fat tax, about marking up a shirt because that two inches of fabric
is necessary if you want to throttle that fat bitch properlike

i’m so disabled sometimes i can’t lift my fat ass off the bed
but weight loss is a drug that kills
and i remember carrie fisher applying grief to her strained nerves until
the glaring exit sign sucked her into moonlight

o, carrie, i hope to be so fat that i consume the men who called
you ugly because you had the audacity to plump with age

if only they saw the irony
in praising a steak’s tenderness
while hating the sight of fat

polyester shirt, covered in wildflowers

they dream of milking goats
until their hands are sore until the wind blows the 
bedsheets dry kisses 
against their wife’s neck & hot 
burning lye instead of liquid soap 
& dryer lint

when they go to the laundromat they
imagine they are a surly lesbian 
washerwoman, scrubbing wool trousers
white froth, seafoam & violets,
their wife coming up a grassy hill 

minimum wage burger-flipping gives way 
to quarter-free scowls, corporate rictus buried 
beneath patties of sheep shit they transfer wet 
polyester blends into the mouth 
of another machine, sinful like shellfish always another 
cardboard voice telling them how to blow god

shit, there’s even ads on the fucking gas pumps now & maybe
one day the washing machines, too, will issue 
cheerful spiels about antidepressant side effects as if neuro-
chemicals are the only problem, as if—

the abrasive honk of a finished load
doesn’t startle them anymore 
looking up from their anatomy 
textbook with foggy eyes smudged 
glasses chapped lips they forgot 
their moisturizer in 
their other life