I GOTTA FAT ASS
and I ain’t afraid to use it. My therapist
says trauma is stored in the hips
and I replied that’s why I have this overflowing dump
truck. I’ll hit a stray
parking-lot-abandoned grocery cart with my hip
into the metal corral cuz ya’ll don’t have the juicy gluts
to walk ten feet. I bless you with a smörgåsbord
when I strut by on the street. My mom packed this
delicacy in my puberty’s
lunchbox to make all the bitches jealous
of my non-tradable treats.
This three-Michelin-star feast.
She always asks if I’m in a movie
theater cuz I keep picking my seat. Not my fault
this monster ass always needs to eat like Michael Phelps
before a swim meet. Gordon Ramsey screamed
my beef wellington booty is raw as in undercooked
underloved underseared by the singe
of eyes the size of sauté pans. But I’d rather be sashimi
than well-done and sent back to the kitchen
of mediocre missionary fuckboys. Does it confuse you?
How I stick to my pythons and nude
nylons like superglue? I don’t need a hollow hand
puppet of a lover that gaslights like a candle
in a power outage. Yes my earthquake ass snaps
all the telephone poles and bridges like toothpicks. Yes I snuff
his chode of a flame with my gorilla
grip’s downpour. Yes I cause car crashes like Pokemon
Go when they hydroplane on this pussy
in search of a jiggly puff
to sing them to sleep. I’m done
being treated like chopped liver
when I’m wagyu beef, massaged by grief
and loves that leave me in the pasture of solitary relief.
Prompt: “Write a poem about something we love about ourselves.”
—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023
Tribute to Prompt Poems
__________
Haley Winans: “I love writing prompt poems because they pull you out of your familiar trajectories of composing poems and plop you into another headspace where it almost feels like an unpressured task or goal to achieve. Prompts grant you the off-putting space to create poems you don’t intrinsically think about producing. It’s a Russian roulette of prompt interpretation.” (web)
