Ode to Arms

An affectionate poem written for my hardest-to-love body parts: my arms.

I love my big, fat arms!

And they are arms, certainly not legs

like those silly sophomore boys told me years ago,

so clever while they watched me contort into a backbend

and fall on my headstand

trying to gain their sneering male teenage approval.

What pathetic little thighs my arms would make,

a hiccup in a storm

instead of the ball-busting thunder.

I like to run my Polack nose over the stretch marks,

my rippled skin as if the sea had washed over me hundreds of times

and sifted my gentle sands to show the queer moon-hours,

like a floppy, cryptic clock,

or a rocking pendulum etched with notches

to count the compressed hours, those days passed.

My arms are soft like a mother’s embryonic sac

and hearty as a supper of gulumpki and borscht, served up

with a hair-plait of festive Challah,

complemented by braised cabbage eyes

which gaze headily on surroundings and unpeel every scene

leaf by waxen leaf. How could one not feel

so delicious?

My mother has the same arms as me, but being still young enough

to resent her for positively everything, even that which I love,

I turn instead to photographs of the deceased, my mother’s mother,

my root in the frostbitten mud,

and the pictures strike a chord in me like a tuning fork.

Grandma was a big-boned Belarusian

and I am a big-boned Belarusian

and we’ve both equally loved my mother

with cow-cud, ruddy limbs,

and we’ve both built mountains from the bare soil,

our kielbasa-squat fingers stained

from tilling the earth, our knuckles gnarled

as the knots of trees.

And so I will not write this poem in couplets

or thinly-exercised stanzas, but as one

big, beautiful slab

on which I throw great wobbly handfuls of words,

where you can come

and we will all jiggle the shame away.

Reviews

[hmm]

I like this, it says alot.
Imagery is powerful.
Nice job!

[Suze]

I love this poem - way to embrace yourself for who you are, even the parts that others may not appreciate. I remember the first time I heard you read this poem outload, I was like "Yes!".... I love the part about your stretch marks, the rippled sea washing them into your skin. Love it.