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"Mother nature, remake me"
Author notes: This poem originally appeared on a wonderful compilation from Black Coffee Creative called World of Women, Volume III, one of a few curations honoring the unique experiences of women and femmes.
I was made with shapes
but crossed them out
with tallies screaming,
Mother Nature, remake me:
Maybe not less woman, but please,
less person,
So we flattened into a double zero,
low-rise,
and I drew myself new with lettuce and vinegar
until the church ladies whispered.
A strict diet of dysphoria, yes,
but I still don’t know whether it was for
thinness or some gender in absentia,
left trainless in some faraway station.
...
But I don’t care:
I am reinvention!
So I drew myself
a line — nine and a seven
angled over the scale,
97, slouching into oblivion:
Took a mallet to the tumorous hips
Mom said made me woman.
She said she’d take me to a clinic
if I skipped another meal.
I’d give anything to believe it:
because Mother I love you,
but if you meant that you should have
committed me right then.
...
I’ll be my own mom:
Enough of denying myself:
I checked myself in and
I opened my mouth and ate -
Every mouth, and ate,
bereft of nothing.
Mother, I made a fetus, nameless,
from ellipses: witness
my new dimensions!
Subcutaneous ovoids
whorl over me en masse –
& multiply for your viewing pleasure.
I swole twice my original size
and they hated it,
said I was unrecognizable,
because I learned how
Woman looks on me:
a magnolia unfurling
like my real name:
a woman, if only for
how I consume.
A woman, too, for how
it wears on the body
and everyone watches.
...
Now we go shopping
And she tells me which dresses
are flattering, also, where I overflow:
“You didn’t get those from me.”
I nod, remembering I grew them.
Mom I love you but maybe look at what we’ve done
in this act of co-creation, we've made of me a spectacle
shedding a too-small dress
on an outlet-mall floor...
and I’m reminded of how orbular
a double zero
looks on paper and wonder too
at the irony of this
surrender:
How orthorexia feels as
strict like it sounds.
...
I share the politics of starving
but she’s still proud of how I’ve morphed again,
drawing my circles more taut with tirzepatide.
It’s the artist that they look at:
they squeeze me into whalebone
and gawk at the specimen under the syringe.
Now I insist: I'll be the subject
and sit for my own portrait: Mother, nature,
take from me the sickness, the tightening strings!
Let me marvel at how I change shapes with every iteration.
© Maggie McCombs 2025
Here's to reinvention 🥂