To the naked women in the locker room,

with your chlorine-kissed
bodies drying in the air,

I am ashamed of your barrenness,
the graying pubic hair,

the sagging breasts,
your soft bellies gathering in a paunch.

I am brought back
to the Loehmann’s communal dressing room

and my mother, still rounded from
my brother’s birth,

slipping on shirt after shirt next to
a woman standing stripped,

staring at a dress next to another
woman wrestling on pants

while her walker held a pile
of crumpled rejects,

those wrinkled bodies
refracted in the endless mirror

prophesying to my child-self,
clothed and alone.

Emily Grace is a Maryland-based poet. She is inspired by walks, myth, and the child's ability to make meaning of the world through private paganisms. Her work has previously appeared in Bartleby. She is also a doctoral student at the Catholic University of America.