Poems About Fat Girls Sharon Wachsler Have you ever noticed how poems about fat girls are sexy? All that talk of curves and suavity can't help but get your pen following gravity to where flesh gathers and unfurls like summer ferns. Skinny girls are not built to carry the fullness of love sonnets. How many odes to her minuscule breasts, her arms like salad tongs, her throat as fine as a picture hook have you read? It's the softness that enraptures writers, that sense of abundance: fifty richly-textured words for plenty dripping from our fingers, staining the paper translucent as we scrawl. The camera is another story. It craves angles, the round of the lens hankering a counterbalance in splint-thin women, hair pulled tight enough to skeletonize, sparing just the jagged cliffs of cheeks and lashes to color, then move onto the sound stage. There's something about fat that is too human; it humiliates the technology -- metal tripods and sharpened lights feel their own glare and strike back. We ought to craft self-defense classes for ample girls: combat training for the telephotophobic. In armies of oversized flak jackets we'd march into the studios, smash optical fiber and looking glasses, crash through sound-proof screening rooms. Then, stripping to our swimsuits we'd stride to the library, decanting poetry from gallon jugs and drinking ourselves in. © Sharon Wachsler Sharon Wachsler is an award-winning poet and humorist living in Western Mass. She invites you to visit her Web site at www.SickHumorPostcards.com, or e-mail her at SickHumor2@aol.com. Submit your comments on this story to our MoxieTalk discussion group by clicking here!   You can also send your comments directly to the author using the form below. You can do both by typing your response below, submitting it and then copying it, going to MoxieTalk, and pasting it into the form there for posting a message. Name: Email: (required) Comments: Copyright 2002 Moxie Magazine All Rights Reserved