Poems
Ode on My WaistBarbara Hamby
Negative numbers were a mystery till the summer
I turned fifteen and acquired a waist,
One day a human hotdog the next Brigitte Bardot,
well, not her but in the same category,
And God Created Woman, not from Adam's rib
but from a little girl, one day playing Barbies,
the next day initiated into a swirling world
of algebraic reverses, rib cage on the hyotenuse
of the hip, gauge the indent, a new paragragh
in the book of lust, boys sniffing like a pack
of hounds, the mathematics of breeding wrapped
in the high-gloss patina of mini skirts and push-up
bras, magazines telling me how to walk, sit, smile,
cross my legs, cross my heart, act stupid,
act smart, not knowing the dark chasm I was stepping
into, the fissure of Scarlett's 18 inches,
the history of waists, Peloponnesian isthmus - corseted,
Athenian bosom at war with girdled Spartan hips -
how to end up without a swollen waist, captive slave
in the marketplace of K through 12? O Solomon,
how could you forget the waist in your immortal song?
Thy navel is like a round goblet, thy belly
like a heap of wheat set about with lilies, thy waist a bay
on the bodyy's shore, the legs' tropical blossom,
equator of a world so mysterious we could almost
circumnavigate it with our hands, then - poof - it flies
away like a flock of blackbirds in the white curve of the sky.
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