The ache of this deficiency sustains me.
It grows like a babe in my middle,

Yet the physique it makes is not at all alike.
There is no luster here,

No rosy flush or glow.
No promise.

And this bulge which I see exists merely
As a faulty figment in my mind's eye.

The only fluttering kick I feel
Is the vacant, restless quiver of my gut.

I do it slowly so no one notices.

There is subtlety
In this practice of prolonged self-destruction.

Too quickly,
And everyone will see the act.
Perhaps it can be said

That I am a student of Stanislavsky:
I imagine my death until it becomes truth,
And I do this until there is nothing else left.

We let them believe
We are fine--
That the pain we write on our skin
Is just a typo,
Not an epitaph
For who we once were--
A eulogy
For the child's spirit they killed.

The air is thick
with a palpable sadness.
it drifts in from the heavens
and settles densely
like wet sheets upon the lowered heads
of the people down below.
I soak it in,
as a supplement through the skin.
I lie in its heaviness.

My tongue is bitter with the salt of life.
I have ****** it of its marrow.
The hollow bones clack and rattle.

Mortality lingers like an itch at my side
That sinks in through the skin
And crawls its fingers forever outward.

I drink my fine, black mornings,
An unsavory sip. One's teeth
Would whine in agony,

Like gravestones in the wind.

In a day, there will be a ****** death.
A sorry mark of my womanness,

It comes like clockwork
To remind me of my waste.

I am a lukewarm pool
For leaves and tepid amity.

And this is just the monthly drain.
The condition sits well with me.

I am not ill, nor grossly deprived of love.
I am not drawn to that convention.

I am desolate, hollow
As the shaft of a feather.
I float easily among the rest,
Through fields of grazing bovine,
Heads bent to pasture.

My belly whines.
The noise it makes threatens forfeiture
And begs nourishment, a rest
From this emptiness.
I push firmly on it to shut it up.
I do this many times. It is a nervous hour.

With each passing day, a righteousness
flows through my every dry and shriveled vein.
This denial of self eats at my humanness.
There will be but spirit left.