What if the Wizard had been large?
I mean not just six and a half feet tall
a bit on the portly side

oh that Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac
Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs
he’s a meat and potatoes guy, that one,
he really knows how to drink his brew

but truly enormous? What if his chins wobbled?
If food would land on the shelf of his gut
and he wouldn’t even notice –what if
he couldn’t see past those bulbous chins?
What if he could not move through doors
when he grew beyond a cheerful beer filled gut,
when his knees couldn’t support him            
(he would try a cane eventually a wheelchair)
if he grew into his chair around his spreading ass
split the chair arm from base to make room
growing growing always as he grew?           
If behind the curtain and the fairy
the booming voice belonged not to a small
ordinary Nebraskan fellow but a man
whose presence and person took up more mass
than three average men – nine munchkins! -
would he still have been the Wizard?

What tricks then would name him
Wizard and not wild beast?

Jen Stein is a writer, advocate, mother and finder of lost things. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia where she works in family homeless services. Her work has recently appeared in Poetica Magazine and Wicked Banshee Press, and is featured in a micro-collection in ELJ Publications’ Wood Becomes Bone.