PLANTING SEEDS

Dariana Alvarez

My first-grade self sits in a classroom

where light-colored haired girls stare at my arms.

I stare at their bodies.

These were the roots.

Thin girls who could bend like branches,

blonde girls with pale skin and hairless bodies.

You’re so hairy for a girl,

they’d say.

and my girlhood, strips from me,

parts itself like glue,

sticky, wet, and messy

as I pull down my sleeves.

Years later, I tell my mother how

my body is a garden that grows nothing but weeds,

how I seem to sweat yet

the fruits of my labor never appear

because the scale numbers stay the same,

how my period never comes anymore.

My doctor diagnoses me with

unkind hormones that grow massive

amounts of these prickly strands.

He hands me birth control, tells me that

it’ll pull out the weeds in my body.

Yet my eyes look toward the ceiling light,

women are beautiful, clean, but

my body is not.

The leaves of my body, cannot be fixed

by the bright light above me.

This cactus of a body

reminds me what I can’t have;

a small figure,

hair only in a certain place.

My large body always requests a shave,

a release of this pain that I will eventually

get tired of maintaining, stop taking the pill

that prevents my body from blossoming

into the wildflower it should be

that bathes in the sunlight,

and doesn’t mind its bold appearance.