IF BODY DYSMORPHIA FOLLOWS ME TO DEATH
It’s proportional to your weight, Charon explains
as he peels the coins from my eyelids.
This would get a girl about half your size across.
He has a yellow rubber rain hat that protects
him from the Styx spit.
He is used to this, I’m not.
No one told me, I say, meaning the price.
No mirrors in Ohio? he asks, meaning my size.
So, I’m stuck? We look at the river together. Stuck.
He hops in his boat, and I sit shoreside,
look back to the cloud I came from,
dancing away fast from me. And I look
to Charon. He waves, rowing away.
Just doing his job.
—from Rattle #65, Fall 2019
__________
Megan Mary Moore: “Before I could write, I carried a small notebook and oversized souvenir pencil with me everywhere I went. One day I asked my father to read what I had written. He explained to me these weren’t real words. Just pages and pages of incoherent lines of cursive gibberish, nothing real. I had assumed you put your pencil to the paper and poetry appeared. In a way every word I write, real or not, is for her, thanking her and proving she wasn’t exactly wrong.” (web)
