More Poem by Melissa Morphew

These gorgeous women weigh 300 lbs.
Inhabit the canvasses of Fernando Botero where they lounge
naked upon cantaloupe-colored sheets, a celebration
of caramel-ivory plentitude.
In the evenings,
they shimmy into blue dresses, green dresses, red—
tight as the sun-firmed skin of tropical fruits. They
go dancing—samba, bossa nova, tango. Their portly lovers
a foil of contrast in winter-heavy dark gray suits, as they eddy
round the dance floor, lassoing the eyes of strangers—
the thin men and women who do not exist in Botero’s
paintings, whose anorexic wish has been denied.

This is a world
of amaretto marzipan, lavender-soaked Turkish Delight,
of devil’s food cake frosted with electric-pink icing,
oranges the size of tetherballs, gigantic
watermelon slices dripping-sweet,
rose-scented sweat on siesta afternoons,
and nipples rouged with raspberry jam.

These gorgeous women
have no doubts of their beauty, attend La Corrida
to see and be seen—abundantly middle class,
they cheer and hiss and boo, munching peanuts,
drinking beer, as the carnival-clad picadors,
toreadors, matadors gouge and bloody the robust bulls.

Afterwards, shopkeepers garland
avenue-elms with golden candescence, thin strings of staccato light,
and the cantinas overflow and everywhere—flamenco—
high-heeled shoes rat-a-tatting to the guitar’s urgent rill,
the dancers’ firm haunches barely rippling—
Romany women in mantilla-black dresses, their breasts
high and round and full, half-moons rising from dark clouds of lace—
and the loosening of stays, and the coiffure-escaped-from-hairpin
promise of
more.