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      December 18, 2013Boob JobKim Dower

      Trying on clothes in the backroom
      of Loehmann’s, a stranger invites me
      to feel her breasts, a stranger trying on
      dresses that don’t fit and I can see
      her breasts are larger than they want
      to be, and she can see I’m watching,
      asks me to help zip her up and I struggle
      to pull her in, smooth out her sunburned skin,
      tug, ask her to shake herself in, she tells me
      she just got them, didn’t know they’d come out
      so big, isn’t sure she likes them, not even her
      husband cares, he’s not a breast man, she says,
      he’s an ass man but I’m not getting an ass job,
      good, I say, because how do you even get an ass job,
      do you want to feel them, she asks, and I do, so I do
      and they feel like bean bags you’d toss at a clown’s face
      at a kid’s party, I squeeze them both at the same time,
      cup my hands underneath them, she says, go ahead,
      squeeze some more, it’s not sexual, aren’t they heavy,
      I don’t want to have them around every day, her nipples
      headlights staring into the dressing room mirror, red scars
      around the circumferences, angry circles I want to run
      my finger around, you should have seen them before
      I had them lifted, they were long drooping points,
      couldn’t stand looking at them anymore, can I see yours,
      so I show her, so small hers could eat mine alive,
      nipples like walnuts, do you think I should make mine
      bigger, and there we are examining one another’s boobs,
      touching, talking about them like they aren’t there,
      don’t matter, forgetting how it felt when we were twelve
      or thirteen, one morning when they first appeared
      sore, swollen, exciting, new, when they had the power
      to turn us into women we no longer knew.

      from #40 - Summer 2013

      Kim Dower

      “The ideas and lines I’ve had for poems while eavesdropping and people watching in the famous Loehmann’s communal dressing room could fill countless notebooks, but ‘Boob Job’ took me by surprise. I awakened in the middle of the night with images from my afternoon spent zipping and unzipping the back of a stranger’s dress and the poem poured out. Nothing beats a twisted shopping experience for inspiration!”