David Southward

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Thinness Makes Us Cruel

The newly slim are never rid
of fat they carried as a kid,
the discipline it took to lose,
the bathroom-scale-and-mirror blues;
and shame’s loose clothes leave residues
of failure even in success—
with moody bouts of vengefulness.

Observe, when they refuse dessert,
how long they eye it—as though hurt
by those who nibble, laugh, and chatter
with zero fear of growing fatter.
Clinging to thinness like an adder,
they’ll wave goodnight, unsatisfied,
and gnaw the eggshell of their pride.

Such veterans of self-denial
assume that thinness is a trial,
with love as its deserved reward.
But love obeys a different lord.
It comes for those who drop their sword—
who’ll traipse through undefended lands
eating from its open hands.

And so the thin re-stock their shelves
with canned reflections of themselves,
remembering how long it’s been
since they were able to dig in.
There’s still a chance—if by some sin
they violate their golden rule
of non-indulgence—they’ll begin
to realize: thinness makes us cruel.

Weeding

You have to rip them from the earth—
leave nothing, not the scantest sprout.
To halt the cycle of rebirth,
you have to strip the whole root out.

Leave nothing: not the scantest sprout—
or hell, you’ll be back to redo it.
You have to strip the whole root out
with two hands. There’s a system to it—

or hell, you’ll be back to redo it.
Loosen the subterraneous skeins
with two hands. There’s a system to it:
bad’s rejected, good remains.

Loosen the subterraneous skeins
whose green shoots mock your asphodel.
Bad’s rejected, good remains,
although it’s sometimes hard to tell

whose green shoots mock your asphodel.
This is a weed, that is a flower
although it’s sometimes hard to tell
(with all this hot, herbaceous power

thickening in a midday shower
together with a fern-like smell)
why the weed is not a flower.
All your efforts to reject it

only naturally select it—
making its offspring more tenacious
and your task, inefficacious.
Weeds that to the eye looked wrong

grow desperate, shameless, fearless, strong.
Needing so little sun and soil,
they mock the pretty asphodel
through which they creep and coil—No, no!

This is a weed, that is a flower.
As humans it’s our destiny
(with all this hot, herbaceous power)
to bring back order. C’est la vie.

As humans it’s our destiny
to halt the cycle of rebirth.
To bring back order—c’est la vie—
you have to rip them from the earth.

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His chapbook, Apocrypha, was published by Wipf & Stock in 2018; a full collection, Bachelor’s Buttons, is new from Kelsay Books and reviewed here. David’s poems have appeared in Light, Measure, Stoneboat, THINK, and the anthologies Van Gogh Dreams and Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle. In 2017 he was awarded the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers (selected by Tyehimba Jess) and the Muse Prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (selected by Mark Doty). In 2019 his poem “Mary’s Visit” won the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. Read more at davidsouthward.com.