Method: I combined magazine clippings as well as some of my own photos to make this collage. The words “me too” are handwritten. My intention was to show a variety of female body parts, disconnected, mixed into a world of beauty. Women are often told to make themselves beautiful–and then blamed for looking so appealing: “How could the man resist?”

Source: A few of my own photos, but mainly magazine images and words from The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and one or two more that I cut out awhile back and no longer have the magazine covers to cite.

Mary Ardery’s poems and photos have been published in A Midwestern Review, Manuscripts, and Eye on the World. After living and working in Asheville, NC’s Blue Ridge Mountains for two years, she has returned home to the Midwest to pursue her MFA at Southern Illinois University.