beauty

Investments Unrelated To Financial Security

An article in my newsfeed says you must have at least 8 times your highest annual salary invested to plan for retirement. My kitchen floor linoleum is falling apart and the cupboards are sagging, still I wouldn’t do things differently.

Times you wrote to legislators
and marched in rallies, hoping
to speak for a more gentle world.

Extra cheer put into your voice
when needy relatives called, placing them
before your obligation-clotted calendar.

Energy expended on healthy meals,
good causes, sustainable choices,
hugs before leaving.

The largest investments being your ability
to walk with a colicky infant
for hours, to recite by heart the words

to Where The Wild Things Are,
to watch as children discovered
beetles, trees, archeology, myth.

Many nights you stood in their doorways,
your whole being filled by their breathing,
by their warm dreaming bodies,
leaving you wealthy beyond measure.

Summer Air

by Grace Marie Grafton

The impulse to remove all clothing, become
congruent with landscape, willow tree
innocent of guile or: it never has to think,
“Are these ruffles fashionable? Is my collar
too stiff? Oh me, the matrons are passing,
do they gaze at me or ignore?”

Even the rose,
though we might envy it, has no décor.
Stepping toward the lake, the two women
take the summer air on bare thighs and
buttocks, the breeze subtle through their
body hair, they follow the billowing green-
grass path, their minds fitted sweetly
into the pocket of their flesh. At least,
that would be the ideal. That would be
what we wish for them.

Are they maidens,
fifteen, sixteen? If so, we must ask,
“How did they achieve such a practical lack
of modesty? Who raised them to be at peace
with their small or large breasts, with the
folds of fat around their ribs? Or do they
disrobe to titillate their skin, send a shiver
through the slick lips of their vaginas?”

If they are old,
fifty or sixty-five, we hope they love the liberation,
we hope they’ve come to accept that perfection
is a fool’s errand, the air a robe better than silk,
lake water a set of jewels decorating every
crook and dimple of skin until their bodies
shine like fish or angels or reality.

The First Day of Summer

by Heather Estes

I sometimes take visual and emotional snapshots vowing to remember this moment for the rest of my life. One happened when my family and I left my childhood home to move 500 miles away. The moving van door was open, I was twelve years old. Standing on our peeling white porch in the sun, I realized my life was changing forever. The moment in this poem is another such snapshot. Looking back through the chapters of years, smiling at the young woman who is still me, now older with the marks of my life on our body, filled me with such tenderness and gratitude.

I lie naked on my bed

in the middle of the week.

Big windows open to the sky.

Sunlight friendly and

cat-warm on the golden oak boards.

A slight breeze stirs my skin.

My hands slide across my body,

soft, even softer as I get older.

My breasts that were full of milk,

twenty-four years ago, now

resting under my fingers,

smooth neat line of the C-section.

I feel hip replacement traces

on each thigh.

I sigh with satisfaction

for a job well done.

She, my body and I,

have been together for years.

Skin all new

many times over

since I sat on a different bed,

seventeen years young.

Wet from the shower,

I brushed my long brown hair,

promising myself that years later

I would remember this moment.

By then, I imagined,

my body would also be

loved by another.