#falley

Megan Falley was our amazing feature poet at the Vancouver Youth Poetry Slam on October 22nd. This is her poem Fat Girl.

At 8:40 you sprint home and make instant coffee.

At 9:45 we finally drink it, cold. I finish your leftover half.

By 10:50 you are already breathless. I live for every time we overlap.

When 11:55 comes I spend the entire minute convincing you to stay.  You never do.

By noon I put my hands on your shoulders and say, “Baby,  you’re getting thin. All this running in circles and barely sitting down to eat.”

At 1:05 you tell me that while you were gone, 15,300 babies were born.

At 2:10 you don’t say a word, just come in and kiss me for sixty seconds straight.

At 3:15 we sit quiet, listening to rain falling everywhere  in the world at once: all 15,000 tons.

At 4:20 we pull a little from the tight joint I keep behind your ear. You do not inhale.

At 5:25 you meet me for happy hour.  My neck already salted, a lime wedged in my teeth, a shot of tequila sitting on the bar.

At 6:30 I hear the ticking. I count your heartbeat like seconds between thunderclaps.

By 7:35 I can see you in the distance,  each second a tease until you drape over me.  We always love quick and you never let me hold you. I dream of drinking you through a straw.

At 8:40 you watch my beard grow 0.00027 of an inch.

At 9:45 we do not speak. Too many people have died since we last met.

At 10:50 we pray for a meteor,  at least a clumsy kid to spill sugar in our gears.

11:55 is my favorite. We’re only apart for mere minutes.

But at midnight you’ll apologize sixty times because it will always be like this.

At 1:04 AM I am already sleeping.  It’s exhausting loving someone who is constantly running away.

What will you tell your five-year-old daughter when she cannot find her face in yours?

Whoever loved you, loved you. Loved your scars and their legends, loved each vagrant hair. The first time he caught you lit up by the bright light of a midnight refrigerator, sneaking cookie dough into your mouth, he knew he would marry you. While you slept he called his mother to tell her, skated his finger down the bend in your nose and imagined it on a future daughter’s face. If he were a surgeon, he would chisel away at his patients until the whole world looked just like you. If he were a painter, there would be one million of your eyes opening all over this gritty metropolis. To him, you are perfect. But he is a simple man and the only way he knows how to tell you this is by turning on the lights when you make love— and you turn them right off.

When you were little, your mother would hoist up her blouse and blame your birth for her stomach, how it hung like wet linen. In her fairytales gravity always played the villain. You used to dream that you could take your tummy to the butcher shop and he would carve you thin with a deli slicer, so when you told your fiancée you were competing on TV against other brides-to-be for a Hollywood doctor to correct the lazy hand of God— he did not say no. He had not seen you this happy since mono robbed the childbearing from your hips, he remembers how the pounds crawled back like a relapse of cancer, a ghost you thought you could kill.

On the show they snip out freckles he had names for, plump your lips until they feel like someone else’s kiss. Your nipples sit on a cold tray table while the doctor stuffs you like a Thanksgiving bird. You ignore the warnings that you will never have sensation in your breasts again. The sensation is installing a mirror on your ceiling, a teenage boy who whistles at you in a swimsuit.