I couldn’t resist. This morning I read (yet another) inspiring post by
on the art of erasure that reminded me of this buried erasure poem I wrote back in 2018 at Stephanie Bolster’s class. Normally, erasure poems tend to be shorter of shorter original texts (and not an erasure of an entire book!) but once I got going, I couldn’t stop…Eve Ensler’s The Good Body is an uncomfortable read about the violence that we women inflict on our bodies in order to “be good.” It reads like a visceral testimony of the wide-spread shame we feel around our bodies and sexuality. And yet, Ensler, a masterful dramatist-poet-storyteller, somehow finds the (dark) humour in this subject.
What follows here is my creative response to what stood out for me in her text.
Good
(after Eve Ensler)
If my stomach were flat
I would be
good
I would be
loved
Be good
Be quiet
Be less
Be better
My body will be mine
when I’m thin.
Let me starve.
I want to be Barbie.
My stomach is
chicken wings, dipping butter, fried shrimp,
fried zucchini, fried ice cream, fried dumplings,
fried anything fried right.
My stomach is
A m e r i c a
Skinny bitches don’t deserve
To be thin. Fat girls
give the best head.
Fat girls always swallow.
It’s the spread we dread.
If you get the spread
you’re dead.
work hard to contain
the s p r e a d.
Mira. Mira. It’s bad.
Excuse me
are you going to eat
that?
Diet plan: kill my mother
I don’t have the goods
to be G O O D
All I can think about
is pasta. Basta, Eve, basta.
Spending, scrubbing, shaving, pumping,
pricking, piercing, perming, cutting, covering,
lightening, tightening, ironing, lifting,
hammering, flattening, waxing, whittling,
starving,
V a n i s h i n g.
OMG what a poem…I’ve never seen anything like this!!!
Love this, Imola! So beautiful. There so much possibility in an erasure poem.