My body is on my mind, all the time—in airports, dressing rooms, restaurant booths. There are so many things I want to say about how it feels to live in this body, to try to find a job in this body, to want ultimate acceptance for this body. It’s overwhelming how much it occupies. I’m consumed.
I have always been too attuned to how people are watching and interpreting my body, a sensitivity that both serves and hurts me. I have never been thin but I have been thinner, and the kindness of strangers decreases as my body grows and vice versa. Maybe kindness isn’t the right way to say it. There’s more thinly veiled contempt in seemingly neutral interactions. It has nothing to do with me really, but I am a vessel and I’m meant to feel the shame. And I do, no matter how hard I try not to. I only feel safe at home, and even then…
I started a recent essay about my ancestral line of dieting women, and have now spun it out into a poem. Sometimes poetry is the only means to address an ache. Catharsis made communal, a way to be witnessed.
A Body of Work
From a long line of dieting women
I came out needing fixing.
My life’s work—
a warped heirloom.
Early lessons:
One. Hunger can be negotiated,
like a bad car deal
or a hostage situation.
My body—the lemon,
my body—the crime.
Two. Learn how long I can go,
how small I can be,
how little I can need.
How to take less
of what already takes less.
Three. We must go back to hunger for a second.
Being human means
always going back to hunger.
Like Sisyphus, push the ball
of thinness up the mountain
over and over, eternally.
Ignore the gnawing,
it can be outlasted,
againandagainandagain.
You silly doll,
you broken thing.
Water for now,
nothing for later.
Bread is cake,
compliments come
when you shrink.
When I’d close my eyes at night
I’d imagine thinness.
A heavy yarn of yearning—
broken lovers, passing ships,
chipped China in basement boxes.
I pictured it like stepping into a room
where everyone has been waiting,
and they say,
Oh, there you are.
Now I watch through the curtains
from inside a body
that will not change.
The same spots
fill back in
without asking,
as if they belong there,
as if my decisions are incidental.
My work means nothing.
If I could
I’d remove it,
cleanly,
a mourning surgeon,
head bowed,
hands hurrying.
Finally—quiet.
Keep
losing,
removing,
until there is nothing left
that resists.