Ginger Shimmer
I order an expensive bathing suit
as if I’m twenty instead of fifty
as if my stomach were smooth and tan
instead of pouchy and pale.
I will grow into this suit!
I will swim into this suit!
The uneven evidence of my two c-sections
will be hidden by the high waist of this
striped ginger shimmer bikini
adorned with hummingbirds
similar in style to the one I brought
on my honeymoon that was not a honeymoon
because we were not legally married
just celebrated in a city park.
But it looked like a marriage, it felt
like a marriage. People dressed up
like they do for a wedding
and we entered a hall filled
with tiger lilies and old chairs,
sliced elegant cakes and listened
to speeches humorous and dark and heartwarmingly
plain and danced without shoes
on the noticeably dirty floor
and washed our feet in the bathtub
when it was time to go. Yes and my body
responded like it was a marriage
giving me the runs for weeks up to the date.
So when we arrived in Cozumel, I was slim
and my chic striped lime-yellow-pastel bikini
clung smoothly to my hips. Both suits, past
and present, share the same underwire
scoop seamed top and I can only
hope my hard-sucked breasts will fit,
not hang lonesomely in gaps. I heard once
that if you give away your too-small
clothes and buy new, bigger ones
you will lose weight, returning
to your former self, your past embodied
presence. By this account, there is something
self-sabotaging in us all; needing to be torn
by ambivalence – loving a newness that fits
our older, more dismayed, and frankly
fatter selves, or giving up this ease to fit
into our former past perfection. Which
as we all know was never really perfect,
looking that way only in this ginger shimmer
hindsight. But maybe adorned with the quick
flight of hummingbirds all the same.
.
Allison Moore is an art historian and holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. She is author of the book Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali (Duke University Press, 2020) and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New South Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Eunoia Review, Journal of Undiscovered Poetsand Action, Spectacle. She currently teaches art history at the University of Florida and is an art editor at CALYX.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 