have you ever wandered through an art gallery
and gazed at the women on the walls,
the way their shapes ebb and flow
and their breasts rise and fall,
the way their curves fill or sap
as the centuries crawl.
do you look at the signatures down in the corner?
matisse and picasso and a hundred male eyes
rubenesque bodies with fleshy rolls
then the Gibson Girl and a sudden goodbye
to the voluptuous ‘fertile goddess’ archetype;
hello straight flappers and eating disorder rise.
have you wondered how ‘beauty’ can change so fast;
too fluid for any one body type to last;
there was pin up and playboy and tiny waists,
hourglass marilyn with her plump glowing face,
but soon it’s twiggy with stick legs and flat chest,
then ‘strong and sexy’ like cindy and naomi is best.
‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’
-heroin chic is the new ideal-
bikini bridge and thigh gap
now not too skinny but not too fat;
lets be goldilocks and get it ‘just right’
all of my grandmothers and the grandmothers before them
have been chasing a body that is most appealing to men;
corsets and diets and little girls growing up
learning that their bodies are code for ‘not enough’.
but what if a body was just a body,
not a currency to buy our worth –
what if we stopped chasing ‘beauty’
and found it has been here all along
just by living and breathing and singing our wild human song