Two Poems by Grace Arenas
If Dolly Parton told me to mind my manners,
I would build a shrine to them,
light my denim candle each bedazzled night,
cross myself to the beat of 9 to 5.
We took a road trip (very rusty), screamed
“Are we blonde yet?!” out the sunroof.
Something heard us and howled.
Ancient Greece has nothing on us:
our idols build themselves. Dolly,
the sheep, the mythical mammaries.
Every other Sunday, fasting. All the women
I’ve met have been worth pining for
in the sense that all of the women I’ve met
have been terrifyingly beautiful at night.
Perfume like rose-lust. Look at those lips, though.
On the dance floor, we do the prostration,
we do the goddess moonwalk. Do you know
who first told you what pretty was?
Do you remember who told you, and why?
***
Eve’s greatest sin was not entering that apple into her calorie tracker app
Nobody likes to see a woman eat
cranberry sauce right out of a can,
not when it’s red and wiggly and
reminiscent of other red, wiggly
things: i.e., sunburned octopi, i.e.,
guts, i.e., the rule of threes broke
the moment the thing of cashews
didn’t divide evenly and everyone
stopped knowing how to apply
lipgloss without it slip-sliding
off on the spoon. Cosmic message:
you cannot be beautiful and eat
off a spoon like some animal.
Jennifer is off dairy and gluten,
Jennifer is off peas and carrots,
Jennifer is off and on again with
the deli counter guy, his apron
so innocent in the morning before
the rush. It’s literal, everything
is literal, I literally slurped my way
through Aisle 4, spilled kombucha,
my jeans are soaked, belly crawl,
every drop, gritted tongue: this
is my way of doing things until
there is another way. Your fridge
is storage for old photographs
you can’t stand looking at; is there
anything you can stand looking at?
Grace Arenas (she/her/hers) received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2017. Her chapbook, “they’ll outlive you all,” was published in late 2017 with Dancing Girl Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Virga, Shenandoah, Theta Wave, and others. She currently lives and teaches in Boston. Find her on Twitter @ExtravaStanza.
