by Violet French
I am five years old
and three feet tall
and my Sugar Plum Fairy Life
size Barbie
is a hair shorter. Her dress
is scratchy and her hair tangles
and I love her. Her hands are dainty
and smooth and her pink
mouth is stupidly small
and I love her. I wrap
my tiny arms around
her needle-thin waist
and pretend that I,
heroic,
can keep her safe
and close to my flat chest. I wrap
my tiny arms around her stick-stiff middle
and dance with her slender hand in mine.
My mother walks in on me
kissing shiny plastic lips
and I tell her Barbie is too pretty
to be the prince,
so I have to be. I don’t understand
why she’s upset with me.
I am six years old
and my favorite show
is Little Bear. The characters
play a baseball game.
Emily wears a blue uniform
and I like it so, so much.
Little Bear tells her
she looks like a boy
and I am furious
on her behalf for reasons
I can’t understand. I think
she looks beautiful. I can’t
stop staring at her.
I am fourteen
and I have discovered Katy Perry
and Shakira. I know only vaguely
that some girls
love girls. I know that women
are supposed to be
sexy. I am obsessed
with the lean muscle of Shakira’s belly
and the way a man
pulls down Katy’s skin-tight jeans.
I watch Fergie swing her braids
at a circle of men
and feel a kind of desire
low in the pit of my stomach. I am still
flat-chested
and underdeveloped
and I decide that must be why
I can’t stop staring at her breasts.
I am sixteen
and ass deep in slash fiction.
I can’t stomach the way
my shows
and books write women
and instead am captivated
by the homoerotic tensions
between men
with super powers. I become fluent
in the language of tiptoeing boundaries
and descriptions of hard
jawlines. Women are written terribly
and that makes men more relatable.
I am still flat-chested
and I think sometimes
that I would almost rather
not have breasts at all.
I am twenty
and bisexual
and ‘wlw’ and ‘sapphic’
feels off somehow. I have settled
into the norm of feeling inadequate
in the female body. I am
pretty and grateful for it despite
my disdain for
the roundness of my cheeks.
I stand in the mirror naked
and with my hair tied back
and I think
that my collarbones would look nicer
on a slender young man. I think
about the dark hair on my lip
and I daydream about what I would look like
with a buzzcut. I buy a hat
that suits my brother’s style
and I am unbearably pleased
at how much it makes me look
like a douche.
I am twenty-three
and I wear women’s pants
that hug my ass and men’s shirts
that swamp my body.
I am still flat-chested
and glad for it. My inhabiting self
is vaguely shapeless
and I am more blessedly solid
than my Sugar Plum Fairy Lifesize Barbie’s
firm and hollow shell.