When you turned your plate over, spreading gravy and chicken skin
and mashed potatoes in a widening stain
soaking like an oil spill soaking through the cloth into the oak
I knew you were like the folded, soiled nightgown
sent from a distant aunt bedridden for years.
Now that your girlfriend is elsewhere, people spout disgust without reserve.
But not to her. She can't hear it over the boom box at aerobics.
Her heart's now a muscle. She's stopped taking up boyfriends as causes
Fat, sickness is not allowed