"Embracing the Sweat" first appeared in 1999 in Impetus, Female Only # 6, numbered separately from other Impetus issues. All rights reserved.

Embracing the Sweat

Eighty-three degres of humidity and
my breath bursts from my open mouth
like steam from the spout of a tea kettle.
I sprint past the cancer house, where the
kindergarten teacher died. She was younger
than me, thinner--she could zip up her jeans
and wear panty hose without tummy control.
Her girls must be devastated. What will
they do in high school, when boys ask them
out? I did not know her except to wave
from the porch, the car leaving for chemo-
maybe for the cure. Once could always hope.

My legs are hot and tired and fat. I used
to think if I pushed harder, faster, they
would shrink like plastic wrap, but I have
been pumping this path like Oprah for two
months and I'm tired of basting in sweat.
It is not raining, but hot water sheets from
my glasses to my cheek. What good is this?
Not a sauna, not sex. A dry jogger dashes by,
like a desiccant, a mockery, while my box-like
body leaks. Whose feet are these? Whose thighs?
I am a cross between the ugly duckling and the
tortoise, embarrassed to be wet, losing the race.

Halfway home I double back and the blacktop
rises before me like a hearse, the last stretch.
Ahead a sprinkler waves, the watered swatch of the teacher's lawn a Crayola-colored grave.
I would dance naked in the cold spray, but
women my age don't let loose, don't often laugh.
A toy poodle, wired like midnight, chases the
width of the allotment, past the curtain of death,
sleep shades drawn for show-and-tell, a classroom
yet. He is full of pep and ignorant, and I am
sapped and too smart for my size, but one thing
about sweat is, that it makes me feel alive.