five poems
by Kalina Smith
Thinness as Generational Trauma: A Study
My grandmother was thin and taut,
beautiful, deaf, and dark-haired.
She had two daughters:
My mother and my aunt.
Always said she wanted a skinny,
dark-haired daughter.
My aunt was skinny but had red hair.
My mom had dark hair, but wasn’t skinny
until she crash-dieted
and shoved her fingers down her throat.
Society is supposed to fear skeletons.
My family strived to be them.
My grandmother died when I was five,
but she left the gift of thin desire to me.
I watched my mother hide from cameras
and avoid mirrors, painting herself with makeup
to hide her true face.
I remembered thinking her red lipstick
made her look so pretty.
I looked like her, though,
so if my mom hated herself,
I was supposed to hate myself, too.
No skeletons hid in our closets,
unless they were wearing fat suits.
My grandmother would have hated my prom dress:
purple and stoned and showing
my flabby arms and a lack of a clavicle.
You would have thought me boneless,
shapeless. Just an imperfect circle
with fat stretched over bone.
Still, I wore that dress and didn’t have a good time.
Slim and angular girls wore prettier dresses,
with highlighter on their collarbones,
hair curled and piled high on their heads,
the only heavy part of them.
But the thing about skeletons
is that they have no hair.
At least I’ve got that.
The Legend of Thumbelina as Generational Trauma: Glosa on Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”
Beware
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air
No bigger than Thumbelina,
I hid under a lily’s petal
from the eyeless mole
who sought me out.
My mother sheltered me
from the mole’s dark lair,
as no one had protected her
when she was the size of a grasshopper
in the den of a bear.
All little girly sprites Beware.
The apples didn’t fall far
from the gnarled family tree,
covered in cockchafers
who kill the lilies and violet,
burning every shred of beauty down
in just a moment’s flash.
While a matriarchal field mouse
watched the fire crackle
and foundations crash
out of the ash.
While others stayed passive,
I stayed down low,
plotting and planning
for the perfect time to pounce.
I opened my mouth and dew spilled out,
full of truth’s wear and tear.
Toads tried to silence me,
ribbetting over my tiny voice,
but it had grown into something rare.
I rise with my red hair.
One by one, they dropped with the flies,
spitting and spewing vitriol
that no longer held power.
I held my mother over my head
and gave a battle’s cry
that rang out in the forest there.
The defilement ends as they all die
and now the women can finally breathe,
no longer under the abusers’ stare.
And I eat men like air.
The Year My Body Became a Spectacle
I can’t remember the exact number
on the scale or what the school nurse said.
But I can recall standing in line right after
to go into our classroom. The boys
were making fun of one who was a certain weight.
And it hit me like a dumbbell to the temple:
I was bigger than him.
A girl.
I was bigger than him.
In sixth grade.
I was bigger than him,
feeling like Frankenstein’s monster
in a tower full of villagers,
armed with pitchforks and torches
to scare the fat beast away.
A few months later, I was in a store.
A beautiful little girl with the shiniest blonde hair
held her mother’s hand and looked up at me
with wanderlust blue eyes.
“You’re big,” she said in amazement,
like I was an elephant at the zoo,
on display for all of the children to see,
doing tricks with my trunk, balancing a ball.
Walking in a circle as they laughed
at my slow gait and oak tree legs.
I wanted to be let out of my enclosure
so I could run back to Asia.
Maybe trample a few kids while I was at it.
But then I scolded myself
because I knew she didn’t mean it
and she was just a little girl.
Something I wasn’t anymore–
hadn’t been in a long time.
Carnal Parasitism
I open my door
and then my legs and chest.
You come in all three, but before you go,
you lay your head on the gash between my breasts.
Curling your fingers in the ridges of my ribcage,
tips grazing my heart
that’s pumping at max speed for you.
When you leave, you believe
you left exactly how you came,
with my heart stashed in a plastic bag.
But what you don’t know is that with every door closing
a bit of me is shaved off,
attaches itself to you like a water mite on a dragonfly.
You just loop the bag onto your wrist
as it beats
beats
b e a t s.
Christmas Eve Party 2025
Slurping Christmas lights up
like spaghetti burning my tongue
on the bulbs.
They taste like cheeseballs and meatballs
and cocktail weenies.
Scorched like Rotel, and Velveeta.
Before Pawpaw died,
the patriarch of traditions.
Before we lost Kyle,
the oh so mischievous elf.
Before we all grew out
of our stockings
and traded them
for sensible work shoes.
They blink in the pit of our stomachs,
like the middle of a peach,
twisted around intestines,
plugged into spleens,
bellies lit up for all to see.
Photo of Kalina Smith
BIO: Kalina Smith (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a poet. She teaches high school English, where she spends her days nurturing young storytellers and navigating the emotional labor of the classroom. Her work has appeared in Nebo, The Ignatian, FLARE: The Flagler Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Tulsa Review, and many others, with work recently published in Cerasus and Slant. She served as the poetry editor for Shadowplay during the Spring of 2025. Her first chapbook, Scorpio Season, was published by Kelsay Books.