Spring Rebellion

by Jennifer Thal

The tongue of Lake Michigan sits heavy in the palate, a numbed

sleeping beast, and has started to lap the sides of the concrete

walkways like a child eagerly devouring their first ice cream cone.

April is still brittle and bitter and carries the weight of

Winter’s expectation, gnawing at my flesh, latching

onto my excess fat and biting hard enough to draw blood. This

freshly hatched spring is a swarm of locusts humming against

my blunted eardrums, plaguing me with a biblical decree

that I will undergo a radical transformation as a fat woman.

A fat woman is the dawn of spring, half-lit and watching others

shed their down parkas and unwrap their scarves, dropping

woolen cocoons and emerging as pale butterflies ready to take

flight 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 racing

towards a sleeping village.

A fat woman in spring is an act of rebellion; she refuses to molt

her weight as others have done during the frigid month of February,

she does not slough off pounds and push them under the bed

and wait until spring cleaning to discard the shameful mass.

A fat woman blooming in spring is a harvested bounty

after a famine; the river of her flesh has not frozen over

in 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 manifesto

coated in pollen and soft with morning dew. She uses

the cleaver made to carve off extra inches to behead

doubt and disgust, traitors who once praised the fire

sparked from bundled flesh then threw buckets

of water on the hearth trying to evaporate

the evidence of their affection.

A fat woman in spring is reborn; she emerges

from the soft clay of the earth as Venus,

oyster-shell hips enveloping a pearled

pelvis, iridescent reveling in her rebellion.