Lucian Freud, of course, thought she was grotesque enough in an interesting way to paint
her as nude…
…And despite me, she
runs her hands through her curls and smiles.
—Samantha Zighelboim
I want to run
through them, kiss
them, ruffle
their hair, and ask
them about their day
as we sit in the garden
completely in the buff.
I lean over, help the red
head pull up her hair
before I tickle her belly,
read her my poems
and tell her my weirder
habits and kinks.
I un-filter around her—
She lets her skin pop
out, perfect and rounded
against the wild green. I wonder
if her eyes match...
Do I want her or want to be her—
I definitely know I want to be the Woman
in “The Blue Room,” serpentine
and half-alert on the couch,
not fat but satirically so—
just as much a part of her
as her brown brows or bow-string lips.
A man could never paint her,
fat women only wallow or frolic
in their eyes.
Men would never truly see her:
Cigarette in her mouth and no shits given,
she glows sex and danger and all things
women like me want.
Emma Ginader is a bisexual poet and editor from northeastern Pennsylvania. She recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Vox Viola, December, The Rational Creature, South Broadway Ghost Society, and FU Review [Berlin, Germany]. She has work forthcoming in Mantis, great weather for MEDIA, and They Call Us. Ginader previously worked as the online poetry editor for the Columbia Journal and as the social media editor & business reporter for The Daily Item newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Find her Twitter account, @EmmaGinader.
