Poems by Sonya S. Fehér

Sexy at Seventy Today there is nothing. Today there is nothing I want and I wonder what I'll look like at 70. Will I be one of those women, bones scaffolding for the breath? Will I fill out like a worn balloon, in orange polyester, allowing lumps where I should be smooth? Will I keep my figure or improve my skin instead of an atomic suntan like the leather lady in my dad's apartment complex, a blue string bikini and bright Hawaiian print towel, below her bony body, slathered in iodine and baby oil, basted like a turkey for Thanksgiving. Everyday the oven's opened with a metal reflector to better cook her face, those special plastic eye covers to protect her cataracts, pointed toes with coral nail polish, lipstick brighter than her towel, everything preparing for a night at Bingo or the VA, well, you get the idea. I'll be one of those old women who wears skirts too short, that top is tight, still firm-breasted, perky, making people think I am sexual, wanting to have sex, wanting, making men, the older ones want me, my mauve lipstick to stain starched collars, reminding my sons I am sexy at seventy. Somehow no one speaks of this, much more disturbed to outline the body of an old woman - no longer fertile so no longer female,  than a fifteen-year-old, like the girls I watch now in my high school classroom in shirts, cut to reveal a belly button, a rib; shirts exchanged for maternity dresses she's growing into, the same ones her daughter will wear at fifteen. So it’s okay to have sex when we’re too young to know how. We spend the bulk of our lives twisting beds into jungle gyms trying to learn how. But by the time our skin is textured with experience and we have no choice but to undress for each other slowly, by the time we know how to be sexy, we’re not allowed – the sex of teenagers easier to accept than the desire of the old to keep. I will keep.             Previously published in The Temple, Vol. 3, No. 4