Spring Rebellion

The tongue of Lake Michigan sits heavy in the palate, a numbedsleeping beast, and has started to lap the sides of the concretewalkways like a child eagerly devouring their first ice cream cone.

April is still brittle and bitter and carries the weight ofWinter’s expectation, gnawing at my flesh, latchingonto my excess fat and biting hard enough to draw blood. Thisfreshly hatched spring is a swarm of locusts humming againstmy blunted eardrums, plaguing me with a biblical decreethat I will undergo a radical transformation as a fat woman.

A fat woman is the dawn of spring, half-lit and watching othersshed their down parkas and unwrap their scarves, droppingwoolen cocoons and emerging as pale butterflies ready to takeflight across the river.

A fat woman in spring is the same fat woman she was in winter;stucco layers of lard de-thawing into a mudslide racingtowards a sleeping village.

A fat woman in spring is an act of rebellion; she refuses to molther weight as others have done during the frigid month of February,she does not slough off pounds and push them under the bedand wait until spring cleaning to discard the shameful mass.

A fat woman blooming in spring is a harvested bountyafter a famine; the river of her flesh has not frozen overin the dark month of December, but has remained tantric,pulled by winter winds and created waves on the snow-covered beach of her body.

A fat woman in spring is radical: a meaty manifestocoated in pollen and soft with morning dew. She usesthe cleaver made to carve off extra inches to beheaddoubt and disgust, traitors who once praised the firesparked from bundled flesh then threw bucketsof water on the hearth trying to evaporatethe evidence of their affection.

A fat woman in spring is reborn; she emergesfrom the soft clay of the earth as Venus,oyster-shell hips enveloping a pearledpelvis, iridescent reveling in her rebellion.