Samantha Peterson - "Dead Men Can't Catcall" (CUPSI 2014)

To the man in the car who shouted

"I like a big girl in bed, baby. More room to paint on."

I said nothing.

I pretended you meant "paint".

I walked away
complemented.

In class, I learn about the tradition
of the pastoral landscape.

How it tames the wild out.

That nature is a frenzied horse

most useful after it is broken.

Later, I remember how your thin limbs
dangled out of the car.

I remember your mouth,
not your own, you said

"Darling, your body is like... a landscape.

The rolling hill of you.

The orchard I would set on fire
to match the colour of your mouth."

And for a moment I think you meant it.

Desirability is a clever thief.

It steals you away from your body.

Casts subject as object,

if it means I am wanted.

I know bodies like mine can only
be talked about in metaphor.

My stomach could be the curve of a sand dune;

my calves a flexing ocean;

you could hook up with a mountain of a body;

you could describe it later
as legs you climbed aaaaall the way up.

But a fat body,

a dirty sidewalk,

is too big to be worthy of a human form.

So when I talk about myself

I describe a landscape,

a skyline,

a galaxy of a woman,

a palatable vastness.

I ask myself if I could be the sun
streaking someone else's sky awake?

Desirability means my favourite compliment

came when a man told me that my mouth

reminded him of a jar of fireflies
on a hot southern night.

I grew up in Portland.

[ audience laughs and cheers]

I have no idea what a jar of fireflies feels like.

But I bet you it's beautiful like the paintings.

Something you can hang up
and show off to strangers,

say this piece shows that nature is a frenzied swarm,

but god damn, how pretty
the jar tames it.

There are days the body positivity movement
does not prepare you for.

Like the day you have to take your body back

from the only way people allow themselves
to find it beautiful.

To say that my mouth?

Does not firefly.

My body?

Is not a landscape.

I. Am not. A fucking orchard.

Or a crate of bruised fruit
on the road you stop at,

on the way to some beautiful hillside
with curves in aaaall the right places.

My body is goooood.

Like. A body.

I take up

this

much.

space.

I'm not some sprawling. thing. in the distance.

I am right here!

I.

Am right.

Here.

[audience cheers]