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A Feminist Ode to the Corset

I told my mother the other day 

I was going to buy a corset and she said

“Women worked hard to get out of corsets”

and yet I'm sure there was a laughing emoji that followed.

She’s right - and we will have worked harder to 

Regain our own bodies and 

The right to their shape

size

confidence

love.

 

I want to wear a corset.

 

There is nothing masochistic about it;

I know i'm not very good at writing 

happy things -

Everything gets twisted up in my machine and spat out with 

broken bones and empty cradles but

I refuse to make this ugly.

 

I want to wear a corset because 

They are beautiful.

The way their ribbing curves down the sides,

Fabric stitched in feathered tendrils

Ornate details

Tongues of silk and satin lace

Embrace 

Trace down the line of your back 

Lick at your sides

Smooth cloth gripping at your ribcage and

Holding you upright to remind your chin of its place

Now just look at the smile on your face

I want to feel like a Victorian feminist.


 

I want to wear a corset because

I think we’d make a good team

Corset and i,

Traditional and modern;

Noble and impertinent;

measured and unsymmetrical;

Stiff and relenting;

The contrast striking against my body.

And yet

In between bouts of red eyed frustration

I recognize the damage in my mother’s eyes

Vandalized by 

A life’s experience - 

It makes me furious that

Her mind is programmed for survival such that

A body is a castle and

Mine being nearly part of her makes it hers to protect.

 

Art does not thrive in war;

Only after the canons have been buried alongside their victims

Can beauty be found again;

Be created;

Only when the siege has ended can we adorn ourselves in fine clothes

And sing love songs.

But my mother never left the warzone

Still finds snipers at every window

Ties chains around the bodies of my sister and i 

So that when the battering rams come

They will not break us. 

 

Mother, maybe the war will not end until we make art.

Let me love,

Above all myself;

Some hemlines are just hemlines and

Not invitations in fact

That is all of them.

If clothes could speak - which they can’t and

We won’t get into it because that is a whole other strongly worded poem -

I want mine to say many things,

And none of them ‘keep out’.

I want them to say

I am no castle,

I am its queen.

I want them to say that i have left the warzone,

And reclaimed what is mine,

That i love my body and i respect her,

That an armistice has been signed but

It’s only an armistice because you’ve made me repeat so many times

“I can't control others”.

 

But really that’s just the coastal route to tell you what i wanted to say. 



 

I want to wear a corset.

 

I love my body.

 

Neither is a lie. 

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© 2023 by Hannah Lieberman. created with Wix.com

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