How I Wanted to be Beautiful
Poems
- Complete Poetry Publication List
- The oldest lobster fisher in the world says she might as well keep doing it
- A Reckoning With Johnny Appleseed
- The sparrows (Once again, I was wrong)
- For the grandmother teaching the children how to plant seeds in the community garden
- Substitutions for Buttermilk
- Make Believe
- For the students
- An Answer
- The scientist and the poet
- A 10-year old boy finds a stick on a field trip to the beach
- Clutch
- Erosion
- Piano lessons
- On the Impermanence of Tools
- The Photographer
- A Deeper Pretending
- After days of deep grief
- The News
- How I Wanted to be Beautiful
- Gathering stones
- Writing on Mother’s Day
- Learning to Fish
- Every day something new
- Insights from Arthropods
- Defensible Space
- Turtles at the Convention Center
- Spring Hatch
- On the evolution of shadows
How I Wanted to be Beautiful
Leaping with arms raised
to save a goal.
Standing firm and tall
at first base.
Moving a cleat through
the red infield dirt.
Pressing the spiked sole into
soft soil and seeing
divots look back at me.
Proof I could make a mark.
I didn’t want to be a boy
but I wanted to be
treated like one.
Bolt of thunder
free from hairclips,
dresses and dolls.
Pride for what I did
and not how I looked.
I didn’t feel like a girl either.
I felt like one of the murky-rooted
cottonwoods at the edge of the creek,
a lake shining in sunrise,
air just above an oak at the crest of a hill.
Shimmering, I pulled up my roots
every morning. Put on t-shirts
and went to school where I
prismed into a thousand veins of light.
Later came the trying to fit in.
Slicked-back hair and
low cut shirts. Wanting to be
beautiful and chosen.
But early on I knew the best
beauty came among
trees and green rivers
and no need to be
perceived as anything
but a body among bodies,
no thought towards
what I wore or who saw.
—
Originally published in The Green Shoe Factory.
