‘Geography’ by Kate

Illustration by Meg Garrod

I took the photo myself. 

My body looks very white in his darkened, twilight room lit only by the camera on my phone. I don’t concentrate on his handsome head nestled between my thighs, the drinking of life. I am forgetting the pleasures afforded by his tongue, today at least.

Instead, I stare at my body, source of so much anger and sadness when I was a child. When I knew fatness was never beautiful. When I tried to make myself silent and small and hide from everything to make the world lovelier without me in it.

Something has changed. 

Slowly, I have found the loveliness in myself. At thirty I can look at my corporeal form and revel in it.

I admire the lush, rolling hillsides of my stomach; buttermilk-white and welcoming.

The valley between my thighs is verdant, nourishing. It is a treacherous terrain where only heroes dare to descend.

My breasts, capped with pert terracotta pinnacles could be twinned with Everest, or Snowdonia, so vast and thrilling the ascent would be.

For I am terrain that is compelling and daunting. I am a map of infinite paths. I am bleak and I am breathtaking.

Poem: Kate