The American Woman - Her life in foods with funny names

The life of the American Woman may be understood as a series of foods with funny names:

She begins her days sucking Similac from lovingly sterilized bottles left by Mom with instructions for the fourteen-year-old sitter to ignore.

Her first real trauma involves her graduation to pureed beets and Brussels sprouts. After her infancy she never willingly eats them again, except when she has her own child and tries in vain to convince her that blood-red beet pulp is “really yummy! Num-num! Get ready for the airplane!”

The American Woman’s happiest memories are marked with milk mustaches and palms sticky with the remnants of cream-filled friends: Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Zingers and Whoopie Pies. When she is older, she abstains from those decadent, individually wrapped treasures that once made daily appearances in her Scooby-Doo lunch box. She is told that Little Debbie and that nameless Hostess are monsters who seduce healthy innocents with their trans-fatty S’mores and Zebra Cakes and steal their girlish figures.

 Yes, the day comes when Suzy Qs and Sno Balls lose their place at the table to more sophisticated foods with funny names. The American Woman’s shiny new chopsticks swipe and squeeze at insipid cubes of tofu and gaudy cylinders of sushi. She acquires a taste for quinoa and couscous, and only privately wonders why one should ever want to acquire a taste for something that tastes bad.

As fate would have it, in the twilight of her life, the American Woman would kill for bulgur-stuffed bell peppers or sashimi and tempura or – fuck it; it’s too late for her figure anyway – a delightfully squashy Twinkie. But she can only dream of delicious memories now, while she stubbornly purses her lips in futile rejection of the nursing home menu of pureed beets and Brussels sprouts.

100 Words: Sunday Venus

On a Sunday afternoon, I stand naked before the bathroom mirror as the four o’clock sunlight pours through slits in the window blinds, painting stripes across my glossy skin. I’ve slept away the week’s calamities and traded To Do lists for doing nothing, and for a fantastic fraction of time I am divinity made flesh. Onyx curls frame olive skin and contend with mahogany eyes for center stage. Each arc, each slope of shoulder, breast, and hip becomes an unmapped Eden, an unsung epic, until –  a hoary tendril, a traitorous wrinkle, a jagged scar proclaims this goddess a mere mortal.

100 Words: On an Ugly Day

On an ugly day, my wrinkles and pimples and dimples and scars taunt me mercilessly, like the playground bully who once lifted up my skirt to reveal my day-of-the-week Barbie panties to the entire student body. My intractable tresses resist all efforts to contain their nappy nature, and hairpins fall like wounded soldiers on the field. My skin mirrors the ashen winter sky and my colorless fingernails snap one by one like the icicles that cling futilely to the banister outside. I am at once too fat and too thin, too pale and too dark, too plain and too peculiar.

Little Lucy

Little Lucy is pregnant at sixteen.

Her mother laments the loss

Of the coat-hanger epoch

And curses the deity who cursed her first.

Meanwhile Lucy is gravid with the promise

Of promises unkept

Tears wept and unwept

Nights slept and unslept.

And yet

Little Lucy of only sixteen

Will deliver a marvel in the morning.

100 words on American womanhood, weight - and doughnuts

I'm crazy. Gone. Crazy. Daydreams of doughnuts. My ass. Made of doughnuts. Thirty. Forty. Fat grams. Stuck to my tongue. Can’t speak. It's okay. What would I say? My ass is made of doughnuts.

Let me be earth or let me be nothing. Thin, strong pine.

Gone. Doughnuts. Gone. Were they ever there? Who cares? They're gone. And I'm still dreaming...of cows. Chewing on my thighs. Taking what's theirs. Take it. I'll have none of it. Chocolate. Riccotta. Haagen-Daas. Take it back. My thighs are made of cows.

Let me be earth or let me be nothing.

Nothing is beautiful.