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JESSIE FENTON

THE WOMEN IN THE MT EDEN CHANGING ROOM DON’T GIVE TWO SHITS


Tell the boy in my Film 101 class who said ‘the naked female form is inherently sexual’
That he knows shit-all
’Cause he hasn’t been in the Mt Eden changing room.

In the Mt Eden changing room
The women gossip like geese butt naked in the shower stalls,
Pull their togs off like a second skin,
Let it all hang out.

No one says the word ‘cellulite’, here
No one looks in the mirrors,
They just snap on their goggles and get on with it
And everywhere there is pubic hair, and pubic hair, and pubic hair,
And some silly part of me thinks,
Thank god,
Thank god there are some places still in bloom.

Here a body is just a body,
Just the thing that gets you from one end of the lane to the other
And nobody’s got time to be a ‘female form’
When the pool is calling.


Jessie Fenton entered her first poetry slam by accident, and has kept going ever since just to hide her mistake. In 2015 she came second in the Auckland University Slam and the National Poetry Slam, and in 2016 won the last-ever Poetry Idol competition at the Auckland Writers’ Festival. When not writing, Jessie can be found struggling through her law degree, taking too many after-dinner mints from restaurants, and narrowly avoiding buses on her bright green bicycle.