Oral Cravings
When I was in group therapy
(back in my twenties)
one teenage girl was sad
because she was plump.
She thought no man
would ever want her.
‘Don’t worry, Tammy,’
a young chap said. ‘Some men
say they love fat women.’
The therapist concurred.
(I wasn’t concerned. I was
a smoker, which kept me thin.)
‘Be careful,’ said the man
who ran the Smokenders course.
‘Ex-smokers often turn into
secret sweet-eaters.’ Too damn bad,
I thought. I was already 48
(I quit on my birthday).
‘If you don't stop
by the time you’re 50,’
a doctor told me years before,
‘you WILL get lung cancer.’
So I did, and I didn’t. Luckier,
perhaps, than I deserve.
A few years ago, they thought I had
emphysema. Turned out not.
It was the mould in my unit – now
thoroughly cleared. My breathing
is very much better. I got away
with all those years of smoking!
32 years in fact. But I’ve not become
entirely pure. ‘I’m a poet. Smoking
helped the creative process,’
I told the Smokenders man.
He didn’t scoff. ‘Oh yes,’ he said,
and explained the brain chemistry.
‘Suck glucose instead,’ he advised me.
I took the advice. Also I didn’t (until
years later) stop writing my poems
with a pen dipped in wine – as I
used, so wittily, to say. There are
consequences. You can see them.
‘What happened?’ asked a friend,
comparing the me in front of her
with slim, glamorous younger photos.
‘I stopped smoking,’ I said, ‘at just
the same time I hit menopause.’
(Didn’t mention glucose ... or chocolates….)
I’ve been lucky, though.
No lung cancer, no emphysema.
I do have arthritis now, and so
I need to get slimmer for that. I’m trying!
But I do attest that there are indeed men
who will happily embrace a fat woman.
For Friday Writings #1 at Poets and Storytellers United, Magaly invites us to write about food. But we don't have to. Perhaps that's just as well, as this addresses the subject somewhat indirectly.
