How I Learned to Love My Stomach in Five Acts

1

I was 14 and tried to take a pair of scissors to the hill

that was supposed to be my lower belly because

the boy pointed to a picture of me

reaching my arms up, exposing an inch of skin

and said I guess we know Sarah doesn’t have a flat stomach

The tip of the scissors slid down my ribs

that now seemed to protrude too far out like a

wave frozen at its peak.

The hill and the wave were at war over whether

I was too fat or too thin.

Too scared of blood and pain and what my mom

would say at the sight of blood stains splattered on the

white tile, I starved myself instead.

2

For two years,

the hill only seemed to grow into a mountain

as the space between it and the wave sunk

like quicksand, formed a cave that made

the nurse ask if I skipped lunch and the child hug me

and ask if there was a baby in my belly

and I still couldn’t get anything right

I couldn’t even get an eating disorder right

I couldn’t get being fat or thin right and

3

recovery didn’t come at the bottom of an Ensure bottle

but 8-years-later at the hands of a woman

with hair the color of sand and a tattoo of a haunted house

and I was warned it would hurt and I hated to admit

my curiosity at how it would have felt to make the cut

and she asked What do forget-me-nots mean to you?

My last client got those flowers on her arm for her grandmother.

Isn’t it funny they renamed the myosotis flower for Alzheimers?

and I told her it meant nothing,

I just thought it was beautiful, was desperate to feel beautiful,

and this seemed less permanent than an incision.

4

It hurt enough that I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t see

my stomach ripped open and my guts spilled

out on the table and dead weeds bursting from the hill

but when I looked down I was still whole and

my wave of a ribcage trembled at every jab of the needle

and I feared it would unfreeze and crash

and it did

but it didn’t hurt.

A burst of flowers and lavender washed up from the wave

onto the hill my doctor said made me a fertile woman,

the kind an evolved man is attracted to by default.

5

I couldn’t wear a bra while healing the garden and

when it could survive on its own I didn’t put one back on

because three times a day I nurtured the stomach I spent years

wanting to amputate with a drop of coconut oil and unscented soap

and in those two months I learned to feel

how I wanted to feel about my body

in the shower as I slid my fingers along my belly and

liked the way a blue forget-me-not floated above the hill

as if it was about to land softly and form its own new garden

and everyone who saw the greens and blues and purples

exploding from the wave said

That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.