Kim Horner

I wrote “Collin Creek Mall” after thinking about the way malls, especially in the ‘80s when I was a teen, played a huge role in shaping fashion trends and expectations of what a person should aspire to look like. I’m interested in the tension between trying to fit in vs. pushing back against beauty ideals. 

“Collin Creek Mall” engages documentary poetics with its references to the natural creek that was paved over to build the mall, as well as prevailing fashion items, stores, and song lyrics from the ‘80s. The “paving over” the creek image became a metaphor for the way I tried to meet artificial standards of beauty.

Couplets allowed me to pack various images in short amounts of space and give the reader a break between stanzas. The lines continue from one stanza to the next to mimic the flow of water.

“Disappearing Act” was inspired by Claudia Cortese’s Lucy poems, which Cortese said gave her a “body into which [she] could pour the dark energy of [her] girlhood.” I wanted to capture the feeling I’ve experienced, especially as a young teen in the ‘80s, when looking in the mirror and hating what I see.

The poem brings in images from the ‘80s such as diet pills, the popular store Express, and Farrah Fawcett hair, engaging documentary poetics, to raise questions about the way the shopping malls and consumer culture contribute to unrealistic beauty expectations that helped create the disgust I felt when seeing my image.

The poem, initially was written in stanzas of five lines each, evolved into one stanza to build a stronger momentum to propel the reader to the end. Lineation became a useful tool for the poem. I used enjambment to emphasize certain images such as the curling iron, the concealer, and foundation to change one’s face or hair. Changing the font size became a way to demonstrate the desire to hide from judgment by making myself smaller.