Victoria's Secret? Kids
Victoria with her nine children reigned the longest
of any monarch before or since - becoming queen
at eighteen has its advantages -
and as she would never say:
The mother-monster grows stronger
every day because I feast upon your beauty,
my dominion; it is tremendous.
The girls whose cheeks blaze "pink"
are too young to know why it's creepy,
too beautiful in their aspirational youth
to be bothered that many profit
off their not being bothered.
The business of sustaining
finds me suddenly Victorian about such things.
Elizabeth Scanlon is the associate editor of The American Poetry Review.
"Victoria's Secret?" appeared in the Inquirer on Friday, December 30, 2005.