I used to tan. Every day. Thirty minutes a day. I didn’t have the time or the will to lay beneath the sun and relax, so I rolled my naked self into a man-made oven that was supposed to be better for my skin. After a day of twenty minipretzels, sixty ounces of water, six ephedra, and sixteen ounces of Coca-Cola, I would lay my racing head and carefully highlighted hair on the freshly cleaned baking sheet and pray, “Dear God, let me glow. Dear God, let me be beautiful and thin. Blonde and thin. Smart and thin. Anything and thin.” Twenty years later, the dermatologist slices the answers to my heated prayers.
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Elizabeth C. Taylor is a graduate student at the University of Central Oklahoma, and her interests, outside of poetry, include God, her children, and cheesecake. Elizabeth’s poetry has been published in Petrichor Magazine.