With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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Judith Joyce is the pseudonym of a writer who has written several books of poems and a memoir. She lives in the Bay Area of California.
My father saved people’s lives for a living. It was his job; if he hadn’t been there all those hundreds of nights in the ER, it would’ve been someone else who saved them — some other mortal man or woman sanctified by the white coat and stethoscope, living on too much coffee and too little sleep, required to look self-assured as bleeding, broken, screaming bodies were wheeled in over and over, night after night.
My lover is fat. It upsets some people to hear me state this so baldly. “Doesn’t it hurt her feelings?” they ask, as if the polite thing were to act as if I hadn’t noticed that my lover weighs nearly three hundred pounds. Perhaps they think she hasn’t noticed, either — that, upon reading what I have written, she will realize for the very first time that she is fat.