these are not monsters. there are no monsters here.
these feel like love, and when they enter you
they feel like something that was once missing is finally home.
how could monsters make such pretty girls?
such pretty girls,
such pretty skinny girls,
they look like the most glamorous parts of life. like everything
that is wonderful about being alive,
like diet cokes
and pictures of hip bones on a sunny, sandy day at the beach
here i am and all i’ve eaten for the past three days is my own fingernails
and these not monsters
can make you beautiful too.

you’ll learn to make jokes about why you’re cutting
the banana you brought for lunch
(and breakfast, and dinner)
into thirty-five pieces.
bringing the tiny pieces to your mouth from
folded napkin with exquisite fingers
to tentative tongue
and when the jokes become too unmanageable,
and taste too much like sustenance,
like letting go, like pleasure,
learn to put a stand hold to lunch,
forget what it means and
by the end of your senior year
you’ll know every spot in that school of yours
where no one will ask where your peers are
and why you look so tired,
and so sad


the not monsters
will tell you all their secrets.
you’ll learn that toothpick thin bones, when crushed
into ashes and stirred into
the twenty, thirty, forty glasses of water you planned on drinking today
taste like sweet, sweet lemonade
and you can drink it
for only the cost of the rest of your waking life spent praising
the feeling of emptiness
looking up number after number
and dead girl after number
you, too, can spend the rest
of your day smelling of what
you just had to flush down the
bathroom toilet.

go, they will tell you,
boney shaking hands, bottle cap wrists
make sure to memorize menus and all the lies you will have to tell
spend hours at the grocery store obsessing and counting
fifty
one hundred
two hundred
no more than three, of course
or else your thighs begin to blow up like the balloons
from all the parties you could never go to
you will learn to avoid celebration
because celebration means food
cake, chips, soda, foods you simply cannot consume
you will spend christmas day
dreaming about burying
your dissolving teeth into your knuckles and biting at your shirt
until your heart stops.

the not monsters
will feed you your first cigarette
and your second, and your tenth.
they will leave your once healthy and shiny hair
in a clump
on your pillowcase, just for you.
in your friends hand, while being braided.

and when your body gets too frail,
it starts to fall apart,
but where sick breaks skin
flowers will grow.
an entire garden will rise and grow
itself from your empty, malnourished stomach
rippling out your mouth and you’ll choke on the flowers
but you’ll be joyous
because at least you’re not consuming calories.
you’ll disintegrate
until you cannot be seen differently
from all the skeletons that are currently
living in your closet
don’t you just wish you could shrink
don’t you wish you could have that control
don’t you just wish you could make nobody know about this
because they just don't get why you’d do this
you don’t get why you’d do this
you’re so so smart but you just googled
how many calories are in mouth wash
the pretty girls
pretty skinny girls
pretty dying girls
pretty dead girls
the parasite can be restrained but it cannot not destroyed.
but it does not even matter.
it’s a beautiful thing to be made of porcelain. to be fragile. delicate. beautiful.
the picture of your hip bones at the beach was worth it.