Leilah's Legs

<p>I wrote this the first year I was going to college. I was always falling in love with tall skinny girls who I thought looked like models. I didn't know yet that a woman's beauty starts in her mind and personality and grows out into her body, so her body becomes the figure of who she is. It's the same thing for guys. You can't know whose body is fully beautiful until you know who is talking to you through that face and those arms and legs. I kept getting goofed up over girls who were like a couple of pencils dropped on an empty page. I know I looked to them like a chewed-up wad of Hubba-Bubba gum trying to stick to the bottom of their shoe. When I got older, I saw the most beautiful women were like full-pages, some typed up and some written out long-hand like in a diary. Full of stories and insghts about how they'd known other people. Often they had stories of rage and sadness, but that was what gave their stories of joy and longing depth. They were real people who could say who the were.</p><p>Going nuts over skinny girls got me writing poems. Finding love with women whose lives were deep poems made me deeper and let my poems grow into my own hands and feet.</p>