Don’t ask me how I feel about food
because you’ll find yourself lost in stories
that glorify pathological eating patterns.
Yes, I am a loud-mouthed *******.
Yes, I will tell you
about the time all I ate on a Wednesday
was a single mustard packet
and you better believe I held the near-empty plastic sleeve
under my desk
ripped it open
and brought the splayed-out wrapper to my lips.

How about the Saturday night my roommate left
for her boyfriend’s house.
I waited for the sound of her car
pulling out of the driveway
then spent the next two hours
eating bowl after bowl of frosted cereal
and throwing them up one after another
until I couldn’t feel my jaw.

When I say “I don’t think I have a problem”
What I really mean is that
Some people have to break themselves
To prove that they are worth
reconstruction.

At night my emotions sit on top of me
like bricks
The monster in my head reads a bedtime story about
A fat girl who does not eat.
It is a tragedy disguised as a triumphant heroine’s quest,
read in the voice of my mother.
I do not remember what the girl is looking for,
but she keeps going, keeps digging her nails into the Earth,
searching for the promises that her monster makes.
She finds bits of debris that she cannot name
and fungus and grains
of sand that cut like sea-glass.
The monster sighs,
“Just keep digging and you will find victory,
happiness, safety, and love.”
The girl becomes confused
and falls into the dug-up ground like a limp fish,
she cannot breathe underground,
and she ***** dirt like air.

Breath in the madhouse
freezes in air like ice.
The drip drip drip
of life
turns inward like a hooked nose.
It is time for the melting,
it is time to have your own breath caught
and put away neatly like mugs in a cabinet,
away from the lips,
away from the throat
with its noble muscles.
It is time to be saved
from your own spent mouth
that bleeds ***** and lies, lies, lies.

I stare down my straw.
It’s floating in a cold beige soup
that I must drink
like some perverse mother’s milk.
Two table wardens pretend not to stare.
But they do stare
in quick flashes and sideways glares--
they’re supposed to be my mothers
teaching me how to get fat again.
The clock ticks forward
its hands make puncture wounds in my eyes
that mimic mouths.
I shift in my chair and my thighs slide
in my own anxious mess.
One warden opens her mouth to speak
but a cough comes out instead.
I do not take a sip
and the clock yawns.
I do not take a sip
and the clock gives up its patient dance and
the warden who coughed pours the contents of my glass
down the drain.
I ask if she could pour me out too--
*****-by *****.
She rolls her eyes at the spread of my thighs
that beg to be fed--
I do not drink.

It’s common knowledge that nobody dies of AIDS,
it’s the common cold or bronchitis or some other infection
that annihilates the broken immune system.
Alternatively, people with AIDS die
of suicide.
I didn’t even consider suicide an option
until you bolted your front door twice
and strung your neck up with a rainbow silk tie.

I don’t have AIDS,
I don’t even have the common cold or bronchitis,
but I do have a long gold cord under my bed
coiled up like a snake curling around its own head.
I do not want to die today, but I checked tomorrow’s forecast
and it sounds like the perfect day
for my madness to burst outward in hot yellow rays
as I choke on my own grey spit
and fatal sins.

Your lips open to me like a flower
in need, and
you press into me like I am the sea
and you are the rain,
and we speak in silent waves,
untamed.