Nothing about her body is beautiful any longer. Lumps like golf balls or mothballs or spit balls litter her legs and arms and belly. They call them genetic lipomas which are neither cancer nor beautiful. She used to think that sex with the light off solved the majority of problems, hid her unmodel-like body, the scars too. Everyone knows people are beautiful in the dark. There is no longer anywhere she can hide. She scoffs at those who complain about cellulite, and muffin-top, and wrinkles. She wants to murder the thin ones who say they are fat, because they ignore their own beauty, willing at their own risk to blaspheme nature. She wants to tell the fat ones to dance before it is too late, because there is always something worse than being fat, and because they are beautiful like well-fed pets and deserve to prance and purr. 

The years sped by and somehow she had missed the chance to glory in her body, like a close call when changing lanes on the freeway, and instead the hate curdled her fat with every sour thought. How she longs to be touched now. To have his hand run up the length of her smooth, beautiful thigh as she hooks her leg around his back. No, she can never be touched again without flinching, without knowing she feels like an old dog or a cheap pillow. So she bathes with her clothes on, cloth billowing up around her until she was a parade balloon, smooth with water. She covers every mirror with mourning black, but feels guilt by appropriation, so she paints them red instead. Even in summer, she dons leather gloves of the softest kid so she feels a young animal’s skin instead of her own. 

There remains one beautiful spot on her body. In the arch of her right foot, where the blue veins float to the surface like loosed seaweed, her skin is still smooth, concave even, with no pillowy fat tissue coagulating below. Night after night she strokes the spot with her bare thumb, rubs at it like a worry stone, reminded of how beautiful her own body might have been had she ever tried to love it. Eventually an oblong callous forms and she knows she has finally been overcome, swamped and swallowed like a tree swarmed and smothered by kudzu. She is now grotesque in the way of roadside attractions, in the way of opossums, in the way she believed herself to be until she finally became it.

Every day, my mother sat by
my hospital bed. She idled straight-backed
in that orange vinyl chair
with angular brown wooden arms, as we waited
for the spread of my bones to grow, pulled
muscles to heal, my split skin to mend,
skin cross-stitched with dark thread
like that pulled from her embroidery
skeins. Knitter of afghans, my mother
didn’t often do embroidery,
but this needlework was portable, perfect
for the hospital.
A hoop,
a square of cloth,
limp figure-8s of glossy thread,
needles, wooden darning mushroom
were all she needed. I spent
those weeks in a wheelchair,
warding off boredom in the children’s lounge
doing arts and crafts,
neglecting the homework
the teachers sent,
watching soaps, and waiting
to turn 10 years old,
to get released, but also waiting
for my mother to let me take a turn
with her embroidery hoop, to try
my novice hand at the delicate work,
but she was crafty in denying my requests, careful
to tuck the cloth into her bag when hospital
visiting hours were over. Each night when she rose
from her chair, a cut
in the vinyl was revealed, like a wound
that was hidden but would not heal.

One morning, she didn’t return
to her seat near my bed, because her heart
needed to heal after an attack
on her way to my room, and I was
the one left waiting
to visit her, wheeling
my chair, with my hands, no embroidery
to task on the third floor of the same hospital
where the nurses’ care and doctors’ well-honed craft
comforted, but could not craft
some miracle to heal
my mother’s heart. That summer, I learned
hospitals were places for recovery, but also
places for waiting
for death, though adults embroidered
the truth into something more tender.
That fall, I sat in my chair
during seventh grade English, staring
at the chair back in front of me, staring
at the marks etched into wood like embroidery
stitches, notches and lines that would never heal.
An interrupting knock on the door
and my father was waiting,
told me
my mother had just died in the hospital.

The picture my mother embroidered still hangs above a chair
in my father’s house, waiting like memory’s spacecraft
to fly me back to where healing never happened.

Late, I would lay on the bed in my room striped
with pink and green wallpaper, dotted
with pink and green flowers, adorned
with pictures of kittens with pink ribbons
and sexless teen idols, stuffing my mouth
with crisp, crumbling crackers, my mouth more
dry with each square saltine I shove—
one after another after another after another—
into my mouth, catching the corners, burning
my tongue with salt, stretched with starchy,
floury debris clumping in wads behind my teeth,
in my cheeks, until I couldn’t swallow, forced
to gulp milk to free the cloying glue that sealed
my mouth
shut.