My mother loved my breasts, comparing them
to those of Aphrodite
in the painting The Birth of Venus.
She loved them so much we traveled
to the Uffizi,
where I wore a gray cardigan over a white cotton blouse,
in the stifling summer heat,
to conceal my twelve-year-old chest
that had recently gone rogue,
from fat to full, from nipple to breast,
about which I felt nothing but disgust.
We didn’t actually travel to Florence
because of my breasts.
But because—
because peeling beets and potatoes
in a knotty pine kitchen in a Dutch Colonial house
inevitably gave my mother wanderlust.
Still, it wasn’t until years later that I thought to ask,
Why did you insist
we share a bath, despite my protests?
Her response,
To save water
for the other guests,
might have been honest. This is something
I think about from time to time, the way that one thinks
the unthinkable.