The history of women is a history of whittling.
View the female body through a magnifying glass from the Renaissance
all the way down to the twenty-first century
and you see mountain considered beautiful, chipped away
until every stone is gone and all that’s left is molehill considered ugly.
And your history, sir? Your history didn’t even make the books
because whoever wrote them didn’t give a fuck about how you looked.
When you call us fat, you call us a three-letter-word.
Let’s do some simple philosophy.
Fat is not an insult. Fat is insulation, insulation is warmth, warmth is life.
Women are life; life comes at the moment of birth.
Women are birth. They are the Big Bang.
Their bellies are full of the universe, of the North Star and every galaxy
known to humankind, of black holes and white dwarfs.
So when you call us fat for the sole purpose
of making us feel bad about ourselves, you insult our universe.
We are hurricane veins, lightning rod wishes, lighthouse keepers;
the size of our shadows does not reflect the size of our souls.
We are more than a three-letter word.
We are an entire language.
You are trying to push us down the staircase of self-hatred
but the irony is that your hands are too small to send us over the first step.
Your fists are weak. We could lift your cowardice
in our bare palms and it would outweigh the earth itself.
We could drag it for miles on our backs.
Our spines will not kneel, unlike your tongue when it dares to assume
that calling us a three-letter word will destroy us.
We are women.
We could swallow you whole.