fat girl Climaxes While Working Out at the Gym 

selected by ed bok lee FOR THE 2020 PINK POETRY PRIZE

I throw my legs into the stirrups of the hugging

elliptical, my knees droplet off the surface

of a hi-hat’s crash while Cardi B reminds me

of my cardinal needs: a fat-sack money bag

and fat-stacked nigga, a pussy packed sweeter

than Saturday. So I kegel, cause I gotta

have one and why not pussy? Pussy’s got character.

Pussy would pick up ginger ale for your stomachache

at 3 A.M. then not complain. I want pussy

caramel as palm sugar, and twice as neat.

I want my pussy to smell like gardenia. I want

my pussy to know I have loved it since the first time

I pried its smile into a lazy camera’s eye,

spied its abundance of pink—the trembling lip

of a conch shell or a tulip’s dazed and hazy hue—

and pussy, you are the only me I’ve loved regardless.

I tend you with a gardener’s knotted hands.

I work you while my lungs flex and clench like fists.

Because with you, pussy, I’m the baddest bitch.

A peacock spider with her fangs in another man’s

throat, a red-bottomed stiletto. I stab blood

from every carpet I step on, and I’m strutting closer

to a near-explosion of lights, and yes,

oh yes, they must be seeing this, illuminated

in this cerebral glow, too, this flicker more holy

than Ina Garten shearing through the TV sets,

look at me—this light and lyric, this exaltation

of Cardi, the Good Book of Bardi, a Bartier

hymn hems even my toes, but no. No one notices.

The music galore between fat girl and Pussy

ignored. What to do with this private love but moan

some more? Pussy, we are loud with an insistence

to be. We are a nailbed cupped with cum, a scuffle

of air hoping to lung.

Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State. Her debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, and will be forthcoming in Spring 2021. She is a recipient of the 2020 Furious Flower Prize, the Margaret Walker Memorial prize, and the third-place winner of the Frontier Award for New Poets. She is a Callaloo and Tin House fellow, and her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and elsewhere.