Homage to My Breasts

Shelley Armitage

October 3, 2022

           these hips are big hips

Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips”

Ok.  So Nora Ephron had a few things

to say about breasts—

but these are to be lifted up.

Gone are the rocks of ages—

Aphrodite, Marilyn, those buxom

girls on Alyki Beach.

Gone the silicon, away with

size B becoming D.

My breasts could get lost in a sports bra

and not find their way to the finish line.

Yes, Columbus.  The worId is round,

not flat, flat, flat.

But think about these pert

nipples

now spurred from their repose.

Roused really.

Such a godsend

for the purest 

drive in golf—

No worthy booby trap.

Dr. Shelley Armitage is professor emerita and former Roderick Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Holder of several Fulbright professorships in American Literature, she has been awarded three NEH grants, an NEA, and a Rockefeller grant. She has published over fifty refereed articles on subjects such as photographic criticism, the arts, popular culture, multicultural literature, and gender studies, along with eight award-winning books, the most recent, a memoir, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place. She is a 2022 inductee into the Texas Institute of Letters. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico and continues to manage the family farm in Texas and its native grasslands, places that inspire her writing.