Embracing Fat

I get reckless when I want to be touched.

Let us pray for the foxes sleeping in your knees. May you always know when to run. Let us pray for your head hitting the pillow, for your mouth when it whispers“Enough. Enough of that now.” O, pain. O, it is no small thing, with its chariots and its kingdoms built on the backs of the suffering. May you walk straight again in the free land. When the light comes, may you wear the morning well. May you always keep part of it in your hands. Let us pray for the courage roaring in your colosseum chest, that it stays hungry and that it wins. Let us pray. For your blessed bones. For your sacred hands. May you learn to love what is holy in you. May you learn to love what is not. To the ones that have not loved you like you deserve, may you forget their names. May you remember your own, always. Amen. Amen.

a secret code between women: are you safe? in a contact of eyes. i’m here if you need me, the littlest shift of a skirt, of an inclined head, of watching the man who is asking you to smile, bitch. you aren’t alone on the walls of restrooms, i was where you are too. the quiet doling of emergency numbers, the shelters. the space between two women in a largely empty train station. the waiting game of two women strangers who walk, quietly and quickly, to their cars in abandoned parking lots, who watch to be sure the other leaves safely. text me you get home safe. the tally marks of drinks on hidden wrists, carefully disguised as other things ever since men picked up on what it meant and used it to target the “weakest link.” 

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.