Poem
Fat Ben Jonson
by Kate Middleton •
for Anne Brumley
Amid crustless sandwiches
the talk is all of fat and fat-
studies: at your conference
you’ll talk of Jonson, portly
and unfashionable, who
was painted fat, ridiculed fat, and,
we might infer, wrote fat –
his verses creeping into fat and dusty
tomes in uninterrogated
dark corners – his jolly, fat face
suited to lamplight
and eleven courses, while
over coffee or in sweats
we shift to brown rice
and choi sum, to
fluorescence, and we lament
the nation’s pets who
by and large weigh in
too heavy, as we try to cut
a slender line.