Cheryl Caesar
The Women’s Room
In the far stall
a pair of feet
are facing the wrong way.
Like a child’s puzzle
or an Identikit,
a body to be arranged from premade strips.
In black and white Converse
they wait in stillness.
The room holds its breath,
waiting for me to go.
Desperate to unleash
a private revolution:
the wearer has rolled all
her self-loathing into one ball
of despised fat and sugar,
torn it with rough strife
through the ivory gates:
now to be expelled, the wrong way.
She’s punishing her body,
teaching it to hate food.
Afterwards, she’ll lean
against the wall, her forearm
supporting her swimming head.
Her knuckles bleeding,
and maybe her throat. She’ll think of Mimi,
and wish she could cough blood:
a frail consumptive,
deserving of pity and love.
I want to tell her,
please stop, you are deserving now.
Do not cut yourself in strips,
to war with one another.
But I am only the obstacle,
the enemy, the cruel panopticon.
Cheryl Caesar‘s poems have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, The Stay Project, What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka; and other poetry in Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply, Dormiveglia, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Black Coffee Review, The Wild Word, Q/A Poetry, Ariel Chart, Credo Espoir, Bleached Butterfly and Beautiful Cadaver. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.
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