A petition to the concept of beauty from a girl who cuts herself out each morning from a sheet of sugar cookie dough.

I’m hoping I have more than fifteen years before they embalm me.

I’d like to see Tokyo or be in a place so quiet that I could only

hear my own hinges swinging open.

I’d like to eat Belgian waffles from the diner

next to the airport and everything bagels

with vegetable cream cheese from my blue kitchen counter

next to my mother who knits wash rags

before I’m embalmed.

Until then I want to learn to stop preserving myself.

I can leave that to the mortician’s

tray of tweezers and twisty rods.

I live in a county who duct tapes my eyes open

to the shape it wants me to be. I know I should

have a manicure if I want an office job

but not too bold a color or I’d stand out.

I should eat a salad with raspberry vinaigrette on the side

on my first date. I should buy food

with the word “lean” in it.

I should learn young how to listen to

the radio on an elliptical to drown out

my own ragged breathing.

I should know that mirrors were for enumerating

my imperfection each morning.

Dear concept of beauty– you gave me callous elbows.

You taught me there was nothing worse

than the word “fat”.

Don’t say it like it such a small word.

You can hear “fat” resonate in every pour

of you skin if you’re a woman in America.

Each letter explains how we were never

anything more than the roller skating Barbie

we wrapped up for our daughters birthday party–

as if pouring her into a waffle iron was a present–

a gift. “How lovely to be a woman?”

I don’t want to be a woman– you’ve made that

something I never want to be. Maybe I’m

queer because all I hear in “woman”

is the sulking figure of my anorexic sugar-cookie

finger nails.

I hope I scare you.

I hope you don’t know what my pronouns are.

I know my OCD will

continue to cup me in his palms like loose nickles

but I want to write beauty in how many steps

I took on gravel side roads that day

I’ll count snapped twigs and cardboard

coffee cups instead of sit ups or my

own ribs.

I have never wanted to be a sugar cookie

even though I have always

loved rainbow sprinkles.

I’ll eat them with a spoon.

I want to be banana bread or

three a.m. caramel brownies.

Someday I will eat food like I read books–

without fear of what they will change in me.

I’m not ready to be embalmed yet.

Leave that to the dentist’s chair.

Whatever I am now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning is beautiful.

Whatever you are now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning at the diner

waiting to order sunny-side up eggs

and a everything bagel

is beautiful.