Now I can say what the soft cotton already knew,

thin fabric shielding the brown eyes of my chest. Flat and unsearching.

Its laced elastic ruffle hugging my small ribs, tight as a life jacket.

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Back then, I could look at myself with an owl’s unchecked dispassion,

not a curve to be seen or felt, though hours before I’d touched

the catalog’s gloss, the paper loud and dangerous. Sweet

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as stolen candy. Even then I feared being caught

peering at the crests and crowns of all those women, their eyes

fixed beyond at someone else—some guy perhaps, stupid enough

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to think the show was just for him. How rare since then,

that flash and spark of terror. How zealous the blaze.

How could it have ever been possible, to scorn a God who

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I know, had made me too, even with all this artifice. Who heard my tender,

wordless praise in secret. A flower garden planted before the winter.

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