Violence of Beauty
An erasure poem based on the New York Times October 17, 2021, article “Exposing the Violence of Beauty Culture” by Rhonda Garelick.
Remember her feline stare
tall and lithe
astonishing face
ferocious beauty
A photographer’s dream.
A mere mortal was tasked
to wrest the chisel
from Nature herself,
to freeze away fat and
slim the warrior goddess.
And so into battle she went,
the battle against age and flesh
and any perceived deviation
from bodily perfection.
Women’s bodies, that is.
But instead of shrinking away,
the fat cells multiply and swell
plunge her into deep depression and self-loathing,
the precise opposite of what was expected.
Her body resisted: refused to conceal the trauma.
In our society
despite talk of body positivity and diversity
we obsess with thinness, with youth,
no part too small to be
controlled, augmented or removed entirely.
Middle-aged women, Pilatified and Botoxed
are living paradoxes.
A world obsessed with women’s hyper-visibility
can dispatch them swiftly to invisibility
should they fail to adhere.
And then there’s this detail:
those stubborn fat deposits balloon
longish rectangular bars,
the perfect shape of the hand-held wand
passed over flesh to freeze fat.
The body
permanently internalized the weapon,
deformed and conformed to that weapon.
A permanent, visible record
of what it — and she — were supposed to conceal.
Mary Schanuel has been a writer since she could hold a pencil and has published non-fiction, entertainment reviews, poetry and short fiction since she was 18. Her work has been published by the New York Times “At Home,” Working Mother, Organic Gardening, Los Angeles Daily News, The Heartbeat, FictionWeek Literary Review, LifeSherpa and St. Louis Public Radio. She has written two novels, and her poetry appeared in In the Moment – Writing from a Spacious Mind, an anthology of poems by the Missouri Zen Writers Group.