Cannot, Atlanta.

[x_los]

I hate the muscles on my stomach. They're small and tight, firm, undeniably what they are. Like roe on top of sushi, little hard bubbles, maybe four of them, neatly placed and smoothly woven under the skin. The rest of the flesh pulls down and away, to the impossible bone rise of the hips, the quiet hollows and incline of the pelvis. You can trace a butterfly shape. The bones are close to the surface, and there is elegance in the symmetry shared by every woman who has ever lived. You expect the body to fold over and crumple in along its inarticulate axis. Staring down is to imagine the simple, almost comical flip of both sides inward, seemingly held at bay by what? Its own eternal potential energy? The body's static spread from that line, that hub? The forces must be balenced for a person to remain her three demensions, but it seems like they're not quite, like the motion to fold has a distinct advantage in physics or inclination, and maybe this is why we die?

At any rate I hate the muscles on my stomach. The first sculpture of a woman I remember having seen is of Atlanta. She is nude, reaching down, face calm and body intent. Her hand is out, she can see the apple but we can't, it is not part of the tableaux the sculptor has entrusted us. When is a goal ever visible or tangible to anyone but the person working towards it? Atlanta knows she will win. She is frozen in an attitude of calm certainty that she can have her apple, have victory, have everything. We know she won't. She can't. "You just can't do/things your body wasn't meant to." On her, on all the athletic Grecian female sculptures of that era, the same muscles refusing to give into a perfect plane of soft feminity. Flat, I want? Concave. Curve in, not out. You shouldn't be here. I don't want to look like this. And they rise rise rise. You can't exercise away muscle, can't starve it off- your body doesn't want it, it'll take anything else, everything else first. I hope no one notices it.