My sisters appear in monosyllabic bikinis
nibbling haiku on beds of lettuce,
bulimic blank verse girls
and centerfolds of prose
wearing short words and skimpy devices.
You run your fingers down their soft vowels,
across their slender stanza bones,
watching the line breaks break-dance
across the page on Dexatrim.
Remember,
they are only figures of speech,
lying out on the page, slathered in sunscreen,
wearing punctuation marks that barely cover
their assonance.
They part their titles
and kiss your villanelle.
I, on the other hand, with my appetite
for date-filled description,
bitre rotund adjectives
and bloat paragraphly.
I down the lexicon whole,
snarf a raw thesaurus,
lick the spell-checker,
binge between dark pages,
and break out in boils and ballads.
I put on bulky clothing
to cover up my large vocabulary
and try to appear
in small print.
--Tenaya Darlington
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