If only your skin was a lighter shade
Here, this bleach might come to your aid
If only your lips weren't so full
Maybe the boys would like you at school
If only your hair wasn't so *****
Here's some caustic chemicals to make it more slinky
If only your ******* weren't so large
Here's the number to a surgeon, call and see what they charge
If only your waist was smaller (just a few inches)
Here's a corset, see how tiny it cinches?
If only your *** wasn't so round
How 'bout you run some laps to lose a few pounds?
If only you'd get your nose out of books
I bet you'd garner more stares for your looks
If only you'd change your curious personality
I hear the masses prefer banality

If only you'd see me for me
Do you know how content I'd be?
If you can't do that
Then leave me be.

My mirror is covered in cracks and flaws, and some parts that make you look fatter, like a funhouse mirror, and it clings to dust and dirt and fingerprint smudges of oil.
But I don't replace it.
Because sometimes it's easier to spot the flaws in the mirror than to fixate on my flaw riddled body,
Flaws that aren't just skin deep,
The night is beautiful but deadly.
When you can't see, you have to find new flaws to detest,
It's addictive to beat yourself,
I'm in an abusive relationship where I don't mean to hurt me and I can't leave myself-
And there's some macabre satisfaction in the dependable breaking,
Like I know every night I will go to sleep hating the fact that I am still breathing,
There are memories haunting me from as young as ten,
Things that shouldn't still be repeating,
I can't work out how it just keeps accumulating,
Words spoken
And thoughts
And I don't know if anyone else feels sentences as deeply as I do,
And I'm running out of personality to stick pins into,
Trying to fix myself with voodoo
They say negative reinforcement is the quickest way to correct behaviour but I make the same mistakes
it's not okay that I constantly feel like I'm failing,
But life is more than a high-stakes game
And everyone's saying that all teenagers feel this way
But it's not reassuring to know that my generation is one of lost souls and hate.
And we're all really angry,
Whether it's because we'll be working till we're 90 or conflict left undated
Racism still exists and the Chancellor of Germany is getting called a ****
While anyone Asian is labelled Indian or ****
And eating disorders run rampant through the territory where anorexic girls get priority while the boy who binge eats is just called fatty.
And this is where I insert a statistic to convince you that we're unhappy but I refuse to be quantified just so I can mean something.
And it doesn't let up,
Compliments are uncomfortable and seeing good in yourself is arrogance, criticisms self pity
And you never know if they want to help you or just ensure that you understand the importance of conformity
It doesn't take much to convince someone you're okay.
There's not much you need to say
And if you can laugh then you're fine and we know no one checks the closets for skeletons because they're filled with people too afraid to come out of them
People accept 'fine' because they just need to know that they asked the question,
And besides, deeper questions get stuck beneath my skin.
And even when someone else compliments me I don't believe them,
Pushing away others cause I need distance,
Sometimes I feel sick from the level of enforced interaction but people only see the side they want to see.
When I told my friends about the time I struggled with suicidal thoughts they expressed their sympathies and it hasn't come up since.
Romanticising illnesses leaves me unsure if I am suffering or if I just want to be,
And part of me has to agree that diagnosis and its certainty would be better than the admission that life is just like this
You can't get better if it's something you can't fix
I don't think I'm broken but maybe I was made to the wrong specifications cause it feels like I am missing something but at the same time there is too much of me and not just physically
I am choking on the sheer volume of my past, present and impeding future
Trying to get it together
Told that it's okay if I don't know where I want to go
But in year 9 we picked our gcses which determined our a levels which determined our university courses which determine our career, if we even get there.
I keep finding new problems
I am still haunted by the old ones.
But I'll be okay,
Cause today
Someone told me to love myself.

in a heat like this you forget you have a stomach, patina’d as it is with shame. the junction of thigh and hip is a bear-trap. what do you and bears have in common? a bracelet of red dents at the wrist and no escape. anyways, keep trying. the four-by-four cube of yourself gives slowly, like a mattress or lung, something to be punctured. there, the air is water-soft. the walls are cream, not pink, but still you wait for threshold to meet threshold, for the mandala-fold of ribs to fall away. come winter this womb of cream will expel you a reborn thing, with fur.

I'm done trying to make myself beautiful
I'm bored with mascara, weighing down my eyelashes
gunking up my sight like a city sewer

I'm finished with lip gloss
a pop of shiny color on my wet mouth
pulling you in for a sticky kiss

I want to be ugly
to let my pores gape wide and let in the air
my skin breathing for the first time in years

I want to claw off my clothing
my fabric fittings sewn to slim me down
to tailor me into something worth loving

I want to be repulsively human
maybe all of this is because you said
how you always love the most disgusting things

I was recently asked “What am I going to do about this baby weight?”

Now I am a woman who feels the burdens of my sisters worldwide
And one might suppose I write to raise up the spirit of earthly femininity,
to wax lyrically of the greatest beauty being on the inside
But this is not a shout out to heal the hurts of the body shamed
This is a poem aimed like the flat of a palm to the face of a woman trying to erase her child’s history

For every whining ungrateful ***** too focused on stretch marks and thighs to see the miracle before her eyes
The gift feeding in her arms while she calculates the calories her child is burning for her
Counting minutes in treadmill steps as nourishment wastes through the holes in what might bind love tighter.
And she traces her stretch marks like runs in ruined tights
Places her hand beneath that pooch and wiggles it in front of the mirror
Clasps her hand across her mouth to stifle a cry of 8lbs left to lose

I am prostrate on my living room floor offering up my body as a living sacrifice - praying
God give me a shark bite scarred stomach in pinkish hue mapping out another dream come true
When the time comes let my stomach deflate to the sag of a post party balloon
I’ll take the varicose veins and wear them like Pretty Polly satin sheen
Every wound along the way, every scar I will frame in honour ribbons and tie my low hanging ******* in a bow
Because this is a gift for which I would give up every distraction in my life,
For which I would sell every object I possess,
Give away every penny I have and spend my life working to pay unending debt
For which I would cut off body parts as an offering of thanks
just to have the chance to feel my baby's weight upon my breast.

Ask me again
“What am I going to do about this baby weight?”
Love him.

i think i’m attractive
some girls say I am
not a ton
enough to where i’m ok
sometimes ill look in the mirror and not want to look away
sometimes
sometimes ill wonder why im in a 14 year olds body when im 19
i think i’m weak
i’m too skinny
but im selfish
really selfish
some people cry themselves to sleep because they dont have my body
i cry myself to sleep sometimes
wahhh wahhh wahhh
shut the **** up *****
youre attractive