Lily Myers

Lily Myers Poems

The Best Poem Of Lily Myers

Shrinking Women

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn't deprive herself, but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her float, in every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I've realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I'm not there to do so.
Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it's proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. It was the same with his parents; I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking.
I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. "How can anyone have a relationship to food? " he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.
I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas; you have been taught to grow out; I have been taught to grow in; you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce; I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself.
I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits. That's why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, each generation taught the next.
I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again. I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled, deciding how many bites is too many, how much space she deserves to occupy.
Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, and I don't want to do either anymore. An obsession I never wanted but inheritance is accidental, still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

Lily Myers Comments