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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