My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time. Her mom showed up at her high school graduation, no one had seen her in eight years. Mothers like that never know how to dress, too much fake jewelry, fake hair, and a big-ass fake leather purse still too small for all her shame and addictions to everything else. My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin went to a costume party dressed as Selena or Madonna or Paula Abdul, just a thin layer of 1985 draped over her tits. She works out, a lot. A pic for the shoulder press: 78 likes. A pic for the dead lifts: 134 likes. Don’t get me started on the squats. She doesn’t like photos of her when she isn’t ready, when her face is the one we see in the mornings, when she can’t find her keys, or when her phone is silent and black and asleep and dead and she has to wait fidgeting in that space so close to oblivion. They put titanium rods in her back when she was eleven to correct the scoliosis. She used to walk around like a black Quasimodo: loved and gorgeous. The metal worked to undo the snaked spine, only a little pain and constipation from the meds to whip her back straight. Afterward, there came new clothes, new friends, new hobbies, one after another on a conveyor belt, along with the chance to document it all. Her happiness was electric, blinking—a ding, ding, ding, ding. Disappointment is oily; it has hair and musk and cracked lipstick. Her mother never spoke at the graduation, just faded away into the crowd per the court order.
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
Subscribe for free: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music