Thunder Thighs
Jo White
thirteen years of peace before girls started pointing out
how your skin wrinkles as it stretches your legs—
ugly, they called it, and you yearned for hips like the
narrow ones attached to your pixie-sized peers, an unjust
dream—because darling, you are not the lies about size
eternalized in your mind by middle school bullies, and while i
recognize why you recoil as my fingers glide across your stomach or
trace the tiger stripes that stretch across the soft skin of
your breasts, your belly, the pillowy cushion of your so-called “thunder thighs”—
i will never tire of laying my head there, resting on clouds in your
gray sky, and in it all, there is both power and pleasure—static lighting like
sparklers in July
heat, warm rain sprinkling down on my head, and the thunder that will never
startle me, the awestruck stormchaser seeking your shelter.
Contributor's Note
Jo White is a junior, an English major, and a Creative Writing minor. She spends most of her free time writing, reading, and exercising her creativity in some way, watching hours of YouTube videos about various topics that she will never need to know in her life, or curled up on the couch with her girlfriend and their cat. She wants to thank everyone who’s helped give her the courage to share her writing.