Shrinking Women

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.
She says she doesn’t deprive herself,
but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork.
In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it.
I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so.

Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional.
As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast.
She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit.”

It was the same with his parents;
as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, round stomach
and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking
making space for the entrance of men into their lives
not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.

I have been taught accommodation.
My brother never thinks before he speaks.
I have been taught to filter.
“How can anyone have a relationship to food?” He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.
I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas,
you have been taught to grow out
I have been taught to grow in
you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much
I learned to absorb
I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself
I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters
and I never meant to replicate her, but
spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits

that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.
We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit
weaving silence in between the threads
which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house,
skin itching,
picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again,
Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled.
Deciding how many bites is too many
How much space she deserves to occupy.

Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her,
And I don’t want to do either anymore
but the burden of this house has followed me across the country
I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry”.
I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza
a circular obsession I never wanted but

inheritance is accidental
still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

– Lily Myers

-credit:Button Poetry

sharing my latest poetry craze. one word- MIND BLOWING.

A Letter to SarahContemplating Super Powers
If I could regenerate any damage to my body,
I would double back flip belly flop
off the tallest building I could find.
I would make you watch.
Would not tell you it won’t kill me.
When my body hits the ground,
turns bone to dust,
when blood splatters across your face
there will be a moment
where your heart stops,
where the belly drops out of your everything.
I would calmly walk over to you and say
yeah, ever since you killed yourself
it’s been like that for all of us
All of the time.

If I could fly,
I would take you so high so fast
you would be terrified that wind resistance
alone would rip you out of my arms.
Don’t worry.
I would hold onto you with a strength
born of fear and longing.
When your vision starts to go black
I will whisper-
If you’d only told us something was wrong
we could’ve held you
told you we loved you.
We could have helped.
I would stop,
as the oxygen floods back into your brain
everything would come into focus.
I would tell you yeah,
every day was like that with you,
you always made sure
we saw the glory in front of us.

If I could read people’s minds,
I would not invade your privacy.
Instead I would eavesdrop on every passerby.
tattoo my arms with all the compliments,
every wow she’s good looking,
every I wish I was that confident.
Meeting all of your ex-lovers
would turn my chest and back into a masterpiece.
Record every thing they should have told you
every how could I have ever let her get away,
every she was the best thing that ever happened to me.
My legs would turn into patchwork with hatch marks
for every time I wished you were still with me.
It would not take a full day
to cover this body with all of the nice things people
didn’t think you needed to hear.

If I could travel through time,
I would go back to the moment
before it was too late.
Right before the moment you wrote a suicide note
that started Dear Jared:
I’m doing this now because I know you will be the one to find me
because of all of my friends I think you’re the one
whose strong enough to take it.
What made you think I was strong enough to take this?
I would go back to the moment before you
became the reason I don’t read letters
without having someone else proof read them first,

If I could project my thoughts in another’s heard,
even knowing it could never have saved you.
But believing maybe it could have saved me,
you would never have doubted,
even for an instant,
that you were loved.

Sarah’s Reply
For the man who found me after my suicide
Dear Jared:

I wish I could say I was sorry for what I did,
or at least for making you be the one to find me,
but I just don’t see the point in lying anymore.
I only have one question left,
Why is it taking you so long to join me.
Don’t you know why you are
so comfortable on Halloween
or during monster movies,
It’s because you see yourself in them.

Jared, I have never known some one
more like a zombie than you.
I don’t mean a B-rate special effects zombie
covered in fake blood moaning about brains.
I mean, how many times have you found yourself
shuffling slowly forward in search of something
you don’t even understand anymore.
Refusing to let anything stop you
wouldn’t it be easier
one single shot.

If you were a vampire, Jared,
would you even notice the difference.
When was the last time you looked in a mirror
and saw something you recognized.
They say that a day in the arms of a loved one
can feel like an instant.
The opposite is also true.
How long have these 23 years dragged on.
Does it feel like a lifetime yet,
Do you feel immortal yet.

You have always been my Frankenstein, Jared
built out of spare parts
by a half mad doctor
more concerned with creating life
than potential consequences.
He gave you up for adoption.
You are so strong, Jared,
able to bear with your stitched together muscles
and your stitched together heart
more than any man was meant to.

When the villagers came
with pitchfork and torch for Frankenstein,
he ran. Why didn’t you run Jared?
Why did you stay, why weren’t you strong enough
To just let them burn.

You used to call me your guardian angel.
I think this is true now
our halos are forged of what makes us holy.
Mine is made of tiny spinning images of your face Jared.
of your belief in me.
My wings are formed out of every letter you wrote me
Even the one I pretended not to read.
You were always my second family Jared
Let me return the favor.
Follow my voice,
let me hold you like you used to hold me,

I am waiting.
I know it’s selfish,
but I hope it doesn’t take too long
I miss you.

There is nothing in life that will make you stronger or screw you up more than heartbreak. I have only had my heart broken by one person in my life — and it was more than enough.

Falling in love with someone isn’t only falling in love with an incredible person, a person you find to be one of the best people in the world. It’s also falling in love with the person you become when you’re with the one you love.

Sometimes the person we love makes us want to be a person who isn’t especially great. But when your love does make you want to be a better person, what the two of you share has a real shot at lasting the test of time.

Yet, there’s still more to it than just that. Falling in love is also falling in love with what you believe to be your future. Most often, losing this is what hurts the most.

When you lose the love of your life, you lose a piece of yourself — the piece that holds you together. You lose the piece of you that makes you the good person you’ve become; you lose the piece of you that allows you to be you. So when your heart gets broken, you, too, in a sense, break.

As there are different depths to love, I believe there are different depths to heartbreak. It only makes sense that the shallowest of loves leaves the shallowest of cracks, while the deepest of loves causes our hearts to undergo a sort of shattering.

The heartbreak I’m speaking of in particular is of the deepest kind — the kind that only really happens once in a lifetime.

I say only once in a lifetime because once we experience such heartbreak, we are never again the same. We become different people, scarred and nerve-damaged. We begin to look at life and love through a different shade of glass.

We will never have our hearts broken in exactly the same manner, as we have lost the innocence that allowed for such vulnerability in the first place.

When you completely give your heart over to someone — body and soul — and the relationship doesn’t work out, you lose that heart. It doesn’t matter if things didn’t work out because of them or because you yourself screwed up. It doesn’t even matter if there’s no one to blame.

If you were certain that you would spend your lives together and have to face the reality that the future you have been looking forward to for so long has just been taken away from you, it’s going to hurt. A lot.

Sad to say, it’s not a pain that goes away quickly. It takes time to heal — and you will most definitely need some healing. More importantly, you’re going to need some fixing. Someone is going to need to take the pieces of you lying sprawled out across the ground, and put you back together. The question is: Who?

The answer is simple. Only one of three people in the world can fix you when you’re dealing with the aftermath of a broken heart. Either someone new who has yet to break your heart, that someone who did break your heart, or you — the one who had his or her heart broken.

Each one of those three options has its benefits, but also tradeoffs. Finding someone new to love is usually our go-to. Most people very strongly believe that finding a new love to take the place of the old one is the best way to go. And for a good reason — because it works.

If you fall in love with someone new, the pain from the old love goes away — at least for the time being. The problems with this are obvious. Finding someone new to love only works for as long as the love stays alive.

As soon as the love fades or the relationship fails, that heartbreak that you buried way back when will likely resurface. The only reason it wouldn’t resurface would be if you were dealing with the pain from novel heartbreak. New love trumps old love just as new heartbreak trumps old heartbreak.

Then we have the second option — getting back together with the person who broke you in the first place. I feel like I need to put some sort of disclaimer here:

Although it is possible for your old love to fix you, to mend your heart and to make you happier than you ever thought imaginable — 100 percent possible — it’s highly unlikely.

The person who broke you will almost never be the person who’ll fix you. Things always have a reason for not working out. Even if the reason is poor timing or lack of maturity, you are still carrying around a whole lot of baggage from the last time you two were together.

Once a relationship fails, it almost always fails every consecutive time. When you break someone’s heart, you lose that person’s trust.

If you don’t believe trust is the most important part of any relationship then you know absolutely nothing about relationships. Is trust re-gainable? Sometimes, I’m sure it is.

Depending on the circumstance, you may be able to get past all the broken promises, all the painful memories, all the unpleasant emotions that arise every so often almost out of the blue. But in other cases — most, even — the trust is gone for good.

Maybe the person who broke your heart can be the one to fix it… but the odds aren’t in your favor. Nothing is impossible, but going after the incredibly unlikely isn’t always in our best interest. Sometimes you have to accept that he or she will never again feel safe in your arms, and let him or her go.

It’s not always easy to move on. Sometimes, it seems impossible. But you need to believe you will find someone else to love when the time is right.

Statistically speaking, it’s almost impossible for there not to be another suitable match for you. Keep searching, be patient and you will find that person one day. Until that day comes, work on fixing yourself.

Love does as much damage as it does because we allow ourselves to wallow in that misery. We hone in on it and allow the painful thoughts and memories to fill our minds and to seep into all the nooks and crannies of our lives. We wait to be fixed and by doing so gradually become more and more broken.

You may be able to find someone to piece you back together, but there is only one person in the world who is guaranteed to do the job right. Only you can fix yourself the way you need to be fixed. Finding another lover can help, but it isn’t necessary.

Waiting to find someone new to love or waiting to get back with that one that got away is dumb. Maybe you will meet someone new one day.

Maybe you’ll get back together with the one who made you simultaneously happier and more miserable than you have ever been in your life. You can’t wait for someone else to motivate you to get your life straight.

Remember, one of the main reasons we’re capable of loving another person as much as we are, is how he or she makes us want to improve ourselves and the lives we lead. Other people never really fix you.

They only help you fix yourself. Be smart and fix yourself before you fall in love again. The better the person you are, the more likely you are to find your happily ever after.

from http://elitedaily.com/dating/person-broke-cant-one-fixes/920194/

The Type
by Sarah Kay

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
You can let them look at you.
But do not mistake eyes for hands,
Or windows for mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like.
They may not have ever seen one before.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
You can let them touch you.
Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.
Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwich, a Pulitzer, another woman -
But their hands found you first.
Do not mistake yourself for a guardian, or a muse, or a promise, or a victim or a snack.
You are a woman -
Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat
You are not made of metaphors,
Not apologies, not excuses.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
You can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.
Even after all this evolving it still feels unnatural,
Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine.
Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,
Admit they don’t have the answers they thought they would by now.
Some men will want to hold you like the answer.
You are not the answer.
You are not the problem.
You are not the poem, or the punchline, or the riddle, or the joke.

Woman, if you grow up the type of woman men want to love,
You can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love,
It is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping.
It is realising you have hands.
It is reaching for the tightrope after the crowds have all gone home.
Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman men will hurt.
If he leaves you with a car alarm heart.
You learn to sing along.
It is hard to stop loving the ocean,
Even after it’s left you gasping, salty.
So forgive yourself for the decisions you’ve made,
The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night,
And know this.
Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble.
You have always been the place.
You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You are born to build.

Cause i'm the kind of woman who's more into poetry than songs. and this one blew my mind, big time! a blessing for the wretched soul, very empowering.

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