"The Blue Cow"

I was eight years old the first time I wrote a poem about being fat.

It was quite possibly my first real poem.

The poem was about an unlovable blue cow I had

made up in my head. She had stripes instead of spots.

The poem was about how big her laugh was.

I didn’t know at the time that everything

was going to be about size.

It was just a cow. It was just a story. She was blue,

imaginary, and she was me.

I didn’t know that I was abundant for a third grader,

scribbling my largeness into the sides of my math homework.

The cow in the story didn’t have friends.

I was fifteen years old and I wrote a poem about being fat.

This time it was intentional

because a boy told me that my fatness

was the reason he couldn’t love me.

Maybe he didn’t exactly say that,

but I skipped breakfast for the next ten months

until I earned a kiss from him.

The blue cow was seventeen when a boy thought she

was acceptable for the first time.

Eventually, I realized every poem was about my size.

Every time I opened my mouth to rhyme a line

or milk out a metaphor, it was an apology.

I brought my “sorry”s with me, at least several dozen a day,

and it didn’t matter if other people thought I was small,

I was still bigger than anyone lovable.

I thought if I wrote enough poems about my fatness,

that my legs would deflate and my belly would flatten and

I’d achieve the permanent position of desirable

and easily managed. Maybe boys liked that.

When I was eight years old and noting nonsense

about a blue cow whose laughter never ended,

I thought I was telling a happy story. It was just a blue cow.

She was just laughing.

I was twenty-three when I wrote my first poem about being autistic.

I put this word next to “fat” and “gay” and for once – embraced my

adjectives.

I am fat. I am queer. I am autistic and I have alphabetized my apologies

so, you can take the one you want. I am no longer handing them out.

I always addressed my fatness with remorse,

never described my body

with anything other than distress.

“Autistic”, that’s different. The moment I knew

I had a chance to escape other people’s expectations,

my size couldn’t stop me from running.

I am not saying that my fatness, something I can

sweat off, something that can be starved,

something I saw as evil and confining

is the same thing as my alien brain, but

they are both my bigness.

The third grader’s passionate blue cow,

not only is she blue

not only was she striped

her laugh scared people away.

That was me.

The blueness was my fatness

and the stripes were my brain

and my laugh was exactly my laugh.

It was sometimes the way I laughed

and other times it was what I was laughing about,

my peers gawking at my foreign joy.

I am twenty-six now

and I am writing a poem about being fat

and about being

autistic and you can believe what you want

about how I distribute my bigness

and when I should laugh,

but whether I am blue,

or spotted, or loud or hungry or

the complete and total opposite

of any person you could ever want to know,

every poem will be as big as me.

I am true to size.

and I am a laughing blue cow,

but I am not imaginary,

and I am not one size fits all and

I am not sorry

anymore.

© Angel Rosen 2021