Fat Girl LaCharta

Reader, I know you don’t know why
        the moon calls out to me to say
You go girl, but I love the way
         she says it, like it’s fine I weigh
the most I’ve ever weighed. One time,
         I called back, remembered the fine

 

I paid to that creepy cop, back
         when he pulled me over, the crack
of his grin, and how, then, he licked
his mustache, my car window, blacked-
out. I rolled it down, and he looked
         away. He looked away. He booked

 

my body, not seeing my face
         until the sky turned over, laced
with light, and then I watched him grace
         my body with his eyes, the price
of fatness. But the moon says hey
         each night. She opens up. She stays.


Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio. She holds degrees from the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Tin House, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, and the Best New Poets anthology, among others. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, was published by Saturnalia Books, and her second collection, Fat Girl Forms, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2021.