My Mosquito Bites

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(This was my first slam poem. It took a lot of courage to first write this poem and then perform it, and I always wanted to submit it here for something, but couldn't figure out where this piece would best fit - until now. Thank you for this platform to share with a community that listens. The words will be pasted below.)

Transcript:

“MOSQUITO BITES”

 

I have a pair of mosquito bites in the middle of my chest.

Their size is an uneven, imperfect 34A.

My ribs jut out of my sides like sore thumbs,

my torso is disproportionally short compared to the rest of my body,

and my “four” (fore)head is more of a “six” head,

says the world.

 

 

All my life, i’ve been told, lectured to that my body is NOT considered

beautiful.

 

 

Everyday I see women’s

bodies being cut and pasted into a jarring collage of “breasts, hips, and ass.”

I see pictures of bared women in pieces of flesh

all throughout social media with an identifier in the caption, highlighting the flesh in the limelight:

“#dat booty

#thigh gap

#boobs”

And these posts don’t even surprise me,

because society paints this image of women that makes me want to gag last night’s dinner out of my body

half in pure disgust

half in shame

because then maybe I’ll look like these

photoshop masterpieces

airbrushed mannequins

in pictures that have gone above and beyond the calling of deleting flaws off a woman like you delete the

tit joke you typed before pressing

“share as status” on Facebook.

 

 

But this isn’t even the half of it,

because before I even understood the purposes of the various feminine organs that I had,

My piano teacher touched my body at the

tender, impossible age of 8,

and when he did I felt my worth break

like a broken egg shell

like the wings of a bird that was never meant to fly

that would take ten years before it would start to heal

 

 

Still, youth was an escape,

and in the middle of my shame,

there was a boy in my class that I

blushed around,

stuttered around,

hoped for,

he was the one time my tomboy self wished for a feminine side,

the one time i believed I could hope for myself again

 

 

but of course, this hope was quickly dashed as

the boy hit his finger in the middle of my chest

and said

“You’ve got less curves than me.”

Snicker. then the words, “ugly,” was whispered around me,

a skinny yellow reed in a sea of black,

curvy Latino and African Americans

My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach with a resounding

crash, sending blood rushing in my ears in waves of shame

but I slapped a smile on my face

and laughed hollowly along with them

Every day after that, before I went to sleep, I prayed to God,

asking for a supple chest so that i can fINALLY fit into

society’s suffocating, smothering, strangling definition of

beautiful,

 

 

and when I woke up every morning, I went straight to

the mirror

‘GOD DID YOU DO IT, WHAT DID YOU GIVE ME, GOD AM I GOING TO LIKE MY NEW SELF?’— to see

nothing.

no change.

i look in the mirror and still

the same mosquito bites stare back at me, taunting me,

“you’ll never be worth much, never be beautiful”

and the sore thumb of shame in my inside grew like a

cancer in my vision

until i was blind,

until I could no longer see myself for who I was

I screamed, but sadly, sound doesn’t carry in your head

and no matter how loud I got

it didn’t delete the damage done

it didn’t delete the middle school scars

it didn’t mute the rejection that said

 

 

“YOU ARE:

“ugly”

“unattractive”

and it didn’t undo the blackening of my insides

whenever the media showed me its impossible standard of beauty

and told me that MY BODY IS NOTHING.

 

 

...But what did I expect, when I had

TRAINED MYSELF into thinking

that I didn’t amount to anything.

 

How WRONG I was.

and after a long time of growth,

my mosquito bites now say,

“HEY, our names are PRIDE AND JOY, what’s yours?“

my mosquito bites say that your boobs are nothing like them and that’s OKAY because my mosquito bites are EXACTLY what I

would call

perfect

in imperfection.

My mosquito bites say that my thighs don’t believe in thigh gaps  and my Gluteus Maximus is JUST FINE

in that it cushions my falls and picks me back up.

My mosquito bites say that you’re not allowed to touch them, or

any of the parts of me that make me “woman,”

unless you hear the words “I do” come out of my mouth,

because the worth in my body is not in

its size

or its shape,

but in the words of my Lord

 

and this,

this is where the story turns around

because you know what?

 

My Creator says that i am

“fearfully and wonderfully made”

in (Psalms 139:14)

My

Heavenly Husband describes me as

“PRECIOUS and HONORED in His sight,”

in (Isaiah 43:4)

My

Savior says that I was

worth a sacrifice to end all sacrifices,

My

ABBA Father calls me

HIS.

I live by HIS standards,

and I would like to DARE the world to contradict

an almighty God that created it.

 

 

So society may question me and my mosquito bites

society may cheapen the value of a “petty 34 A”

but i say to society,

look.

There’s nothing more unnecessary

than your input in the intimate conversation concerning my body

and this is an A and B conversation,

34A and B conversation to be exact,

so you can

C your way out the

D-Door.

 

 

Thank you.


 

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