I saw a woman shaking it, just shaking it all on the beach in Key West. She had just stood up from her blanket from sunbathing and was wearing a thin black thong bikini looking like a black-haired Venus rising from the sand with a thick tan ass and thighs, which she shook like thunder — her ass and thighs and hips and belly, and arms outstretched toward the sea — as if she were drawing from it, calling forth its power with her jiggly dance. Though several of us looked on, it was clear she wasn’t dancing for any of us. And it made me think as a woman how we are always thought to be doing some dance or some act for others. That we are charged to dance for our worth, our partners, please our men, give, give, give to our parents (“just make them happy”), children, neighbors, community, kin. Give everyone what they want of you. Do the ancient song and dance, woman. Please everyone and everything around until you are dessicated of your last drop. But no, I watched this ripe, juicy woman on the beach dance and suck in each droplet of sea into her soul to say this too, all of it, just like my own body, can be mine and mine alone.
I saw a woman shaking it, just shaking it all on the beach in Key West.
