Michelle Bitting

Disaster Fat

No way not to pack the extra pounds back on. Grief dictated we swallow copious sugar, flour, cream—comfort foods passed daily our direction. Confounding, but hardly brutal, our bad luck, compared to others, the pounded world. Look how safe we stayed! Wrapped in an obesity of kindness. Delivered in corpulent forms: in puddings, steaks, posh lamps and stuffed pleather chairs. In hand-stitched quilts flush with every succulent color, shrouding the scorch, the insurance claim burn. Flung to our doorstep? Not bombs but bags of donated clothes. Each friend, each heavenly body making the scars of all that blazed fade from our lot’s smoked history. Forests may be gorgeous, but there’s nothing more alive than a tree that learns to grow in a cemetery. If, that is, there’s love. Even a seed.

— with a line by Andrea Gibson

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Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook is Dummy Ventriloquist (C & R Press, 2024). Her poetry appears on The Slowdown, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and as a Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.