November 2021
I SAW A PICTURE of myself, and for the first time, I recognized that I have a krip body. How can it be that at 37 years old, and disabled my whole life, I am just now able to take-in my body as it exists?
My proportions are normatively out of whack.
My right hip butts out, arching the right side of my abdomen into a C where my massive breast almost reaches my right love handle. There is no love handle on my left side.
My right arm is giant and strong, attached to broad shoulders that have scaled Mt. Vesuvius in another life using only two big sticks. Nails bitten to nubs. My left arm holds onto my romantic partner for stability, someone I have chosen to live this life alongside and reproduce with.
My spine is most surely twisted, my legs forcing it into a scoliosis slant. My right breast larger due to gravity and my krip lean.
My right leg is thick, all the way to its ankle, and strong with defined muscle that all but overpowers cellulite.
My left leg, dimpled with surgical memories,
cocked, ball and socket ankle
sprouting my arched foot and limping toes at a 45-degree angle from where the norm wants it.
I wear shoes, cracking coal-colored Converse with substitute white laces, that ultimately hurt my flat feet, knees, hips, and back when I stand or walk too long.
The left foot has my shoe on its toes like an awkward tripod for balance.
I wear power earrings, Jose Guadalupe Posada’s La Catrina cast in silver, my head the living bourgeois calavera of the three. Two braids pulled back tightly on my partially shaved head—the camera cannot capture this hairdo. I smile, showing my teeth that are still white despite all the coffee.
The black shirt I wear, a hand-me-down from when mi otro dressed in his art show drag. It is snug and flattering because I’m wearing my most supportive and overworked push-up bra.
My thrifted, respectable, Chicana, leopard print skirt covers the worst—or best—of the scars, including the flesh that MERSA ate away from my thigh when I was 9 years old.
Pin-site holes you can fit a finger into.
I SAW A PICTURE of myself, krip body, with my bean and my baby.
We were recreating a snapshot of a pregnancy photo 3 years before.
The baby was in my belly, my partner and I a little thinner with fewer grays, not knowing what the following three years would bring.
We lived it and now we’re here.
Being this person’s mother has made me love this body, more.
My pussy birthed a mother fucking goddess!
My legs and back and arms and head and neck and ribs have all recovered from those 9 months of stress.
My body can recover.
My mind can heal.
My bodymind entered a new phase after becoming a parent.
I can now see my body and not wince away or focus only on the parts of me that look “normal.”
I’m too tired to try to stuff my body inside normative shapes that have never accepted it.
Now, I validate myself.
I love my krip body.
Las Muletas 