She restrained herself. Daily.
One hemisphere for each heft.
A strap on the right, a strap on the left.
A clasp attached at the back.
She felt a bit tight. Pressed.
But contained. Supported.
A place for every breast.
Every breast in its place.
With an eye-enticing trace
right down the middle.
But one day,
she felt too pinched.
Stifled. Chafed. Trapped.
Though she sat at her office,
she could no longer abide the searing
around her middle.
She reached behind, unhitched,
and
felt full flush the flow,
a sudden surge of sense of self,
inspiration unbound,
as if she had unpinned not just
breasts but wings
and she flew,
in warm currents of wind
incongruous to her cubicle.
Her breasts freed from bondage!
She wanted to see them
in their unrestrained positions but
could only peek down her blouse,
though she wanted to remove that covering, too.
She settled for peeling away
the set of shells on straps,
snaking it out of a sleeve.
Then she studied the clever contraption--
rubbing its artificial foaminess,
pinching the whimsy of its underwiring--
and discovered for it a new purpose:
She clenched together its tethers,
hung the thing from a hook,
and filled one of its cups with paperclips,
the other with sundry thumbtacks.
Surely, she thought,
such a clasping, clutching contrivance serves
more sustainably, and more symbolically,
for cradling uncounted collections of
small, sharp, synthetic fasteners
that one doesn't want spilling out all over the place,
and not for the restraint of
what should not be stapled--
a curving set of soft, smooth, vital appendages,
so close to the heart and lungs.
So much like wings.
This poem motivated by the article "Your Bra May Be Killing You - Scientists Calls for Boycott of Komen"