How to Squat Your Own Weight                  

Ellen McGrath Smith

To work up to squatting your own weight, you need to weigh yourself and stay there.

Begin by squatting over a very low ottoman covered with cat hairs, clutching two dumbbells against your tensed gut.  Get to know your heels, how they’re there for you only when your calves can forgive them for shirking for years. To this end, tell your calf muscles they are darling baby skulls, and rub them; coo if it helps you to mean it.

In four sets of fifteen repetitions, you’ll be squatting the approximate weight of a cat, but one must start somewhere, and wall chairs induce a certain torpor and despair—so you might as well do this.

You are an elevator, your spine’s the cable:  ding ding ding ding:  you send your ass an ultimatum.

Every few weeks, buy more weight, moving up to the barbells:  ding ding ding:  it’s the Herculean shoulder bit with these as you go down with a beagle or lamb around your neck in the manner of shepherds helping the hurt ones, or you might think of this as shouldering an office chair, and if you cannot piston-push your legs up from the squat, try not to panic, just stay down there, breathe and think of laying insulation in a crawlspace near a roof or crouching in a Tokyo hotel-room.

Slowly, summon all the weight back to your heels, as if your heels were both whole hooves and you were a centaur rearing.  This vote of confidence enlivens them.  Or, if you still feel hopeless, gently, gently lift the barbell high above your head, then set it down in front of you, an offering—of the fatted calf itself or you at half your weight.

Look at the weight as though it's a new baby, then pan your gaze up to the ceiling—not beseechingly but certain that, someday, you’ll be able to carry your own body.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program.  Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cerise, The Same, Kestrel, Oranges & Sardines, Diner, 5 a.m., Oxford Magazine, The Prose Poem, Southern Poetry Review, Descant (Canada), and others.  Her critical work has been published in Sagetrieb, The Denver Quarterly, The American Book Review and other journals. Her poetry has been recognized with an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and, more recently, a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.