WELCOME BACK ROXY WOOOOO HERE'S POEMS

Author's note: I know I've techincally aged out of YWP but I'm still around and I'm still writing. Here's a poem and more are coming!

Bat mitzvah dresses have to be ugly, they must be ugly, they are always ugly, they must make the girl look beautiful.
She isn’t beautiful.
She is gangly and her knees are scabby, she is still growing into her adult frame, she is skinny in all the wrong places.
She has had her unruly hair-the hair has to be unruly, the hair must be unruly, the hair is always unruly-styled with a blow dryer and hair spray to make it flat and smooth.
She did her own makeup. She used the eyeshadow she bought at CVS, it matches her dress, and it is applied unevenly with a clumsy hand.
She has braces on her teeth, with rubber bands picked out to match the dress. The lenses of her glasses have been scrubbed and wiped and cleaned, but the scratches remain.
 
Her mother’s bat mitzvah dress was ugly, too, custom-made of pink taffeta and pearls and far too much applique.
The girl has seen her mother’s bat mitzvah dress, hanging in a plastic bag in the back of a closet, preserved and pristine and perfect and so, so ugly.
Her grandmothers didn’t have bat mitzvahs, but if they had had them their dresses would have been ugly, too.
The dresses are ugly and the girls are not beautiful.
Her mother is crying in the pews today, her mother had to wear a kippah today even though she never wears a kippah. Her mother has begun to dye her hair to ward off the at the gray roots.
Her mother’s dress is not ugly and she is wearing high heels.
The girl is not wearing high heels because they make her feet hurt. The mother’s feet hurt but she is wearing them anyways.
The mother has straightened her hair, she has straightened her hair every day for thirty years, it is always flat and smooth, except when it rains.
Her mother is beautiful, even when she is wearing a kippah and even when she is crying.
 
The girl is going up to the bimah. Everyone sees the dress and how ugly it is.
The girl is wearing the dress. The dress is wearing the girl. The girl is becoming a woman. The girl hasn’t had her first period yet but she is becoming a woman nonetheless. The dress is becoming a woman’s dress. The dress is ugly.
The girl is a woman, she has to be a woman, she must be a woman, she has always been a woman.
She is on the bimah.
She takes a deep breath as best as she can, the dress is a little too tight. She picked it out months ago and then grew half a size, so now it is a little too tight.
She had her baby naming on this bimah, and her parents had their aufruf on this bimah, and some day she will join her beloved under the chuppah and she will stand on this bimah. She was a beautiful baby. She was not a beautiful girl. She is going to be a woman.
Maybe she will be a beautiful woman. Maybe the girl in the ugly dress is beautiful even now because the woman might be beautiful.
Maybe the dress is ugly but maybe the girl is beautiful when she stands on the bimah beneath the eternal light and maybe she is beautiful like Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah were beautiful.
Maybe she is beautiful like her grandmothers were beautiful
She wears her grandmother’s earrings and those are definitely beautiful.
She is wearing her grandmother’s beautiful earrings and her hair is flat and smooth and her braces are poking her gums and she is on the bimah reading from the Torah even though the Yad is right-handed and she is left-handed.
She knows her portion by heart but she follows along with the right-handed Yad anyways, watching the words on the scroll as she goes. She only messes up once or twice.
She says the blessing. She knows the blessing. The blessing will probably be in her head forever.
 She is blessing. She is blessed. She is beautiful.
 
Maybe the dress is still ugly.
It has to be ugly, it must be ugly, it is always ugly.
But she picked it out and her grandmother wasn’t there to help her like she had always promised tp would be, but even then, even then, the girl saw something in that dress that she can’t yet see in herself.
The girl is beautiful and the girl is a woman and the dress is ugly and the service is over and they are throwing candy and all is as it should be, as it has to be, as it must be, as it will always be. L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, girls in ugly dresses and women crying in the pews and everything, everything is beautiful.