Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language.
i.
I used to play with eating disorders
like a cat batting at a moth,
a vicious up-down, claws out,
"let’s see how long I can keep this going
without dying first—”
I am better now.
I would not say
I am fine most of the time,
I would not say that I am pleased
with the stomach that spills
across my ribs, curving
like a sun or bowl —
but I am better.
ii.
The mirror is not my friend.
It is an creeping shadow
peeking out from the corner of the room.
I treat it with the same distrust
I would if I had seen my reflection inside it blink,
speak, step out and approach me ;
but some days I practice smiling at myself in it—
not to change the shape or smile or corners,
I’ve heard it’s good practice for being happy,
you can train a grin and teach your body
contentedness.
It hasn’t worked yet but
some days I stand naked in front of it,
hands on my hips, my skin,
over my eyes in resignation
because I don’t want to see
the shame in them.
I audit blemishes and lines
and old scars I thought
had found their way from me
and sometimes
I wish I were less.
iii.
Whenever I say that I wish
I were less, I stutter
on the definition.
Do I want less hip and breast
and stomach, do I want less reminders
of sun and cups and curved hands on me
or do I want a shallower existence,
a murmuring voice with nothing to say
and no expectations?
Do I want less hours, days,
decades, to be gone or invisible or
ignored entirely? Sometimes I wish
I were less so that
there was not enough of me
to matter when I fucked things up again.
I know that you can see it in
the puffy skin around my eyes
and the shortened nails that my hands
will not let stay long,
and I am less in that
that I will not recover; I am trying
so hard
and you can see how badly I am failing.
I don't want to be that sort of less.
iv.
The mirror is at odds with me
because I am in the habit
of needing validation.
I want to ask
if I look pretty today,
if I am can leave the house
without wanting to tear my skin
away from my body and the mirror
is a question mark that will not, can not be answered
and on the days that I cannot bring myself
to smile,
my frowns and sun-curved stomach
and breasts and hips
mock the asking.
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137,563 Literary Works • 672,043 Reviews
ohmygod this was beautiful beautiful beautiful. one of my favorites you have ever posted. i shall return for a review at a later point in time!
Persy! I want to say first that I LOVE YOU. I love you so much.
I love the emotion that runs quietly through this poem, because obviously this is a serious, charged topic that can affect a lot of people. It hits the vicious feelings like wanting to tear your skin away from your body, like auditing blemishes and lines. A lot of these images are very specific and recognizable. You did a wonderful job of writing truly.
With that said, I'm going to review this piece from the point of view of a literary journal, which means I have, at my finger tips, any number of other poems on the same subject. So what I'm looking for then, is for new images or new emotions I haven't encountered before.
Which is awesome, 'cause you hit me with one up top:
This is gorgeous. This is honest and mind-bending, and brings us a new feeling about this situation, because cat and moth battles are naturally concerned with death.
You also hit me with a strong progression in the last stanza. I like the sun-curved stomach image best when given to me only once. Repeated, it loses its strength because it's been done in other poems, and over-doing it in one makes it lose the regality that it has innately.
The problem is that in much of the rest of the poem, I'm not engaged. I don't say that lightly. I know this is an important and emotional poem. I'm not saying I don't care about the situation, but the fact is that most people care only about the specific situations of people they know when they know the specifics. It's very hard to care about something general, and because these images and this situation is experienced by so many people in the same way, we tend to think of any specific description that doesn't bring out something new as general, so we're pushed away from the center of emotion.
Looking forward, I'd say try to stick to your two strengths: new metaphors/comparisons and new abstract narratives. You managed to clearly capture your subject in the first stanza and the last, and more exploration with those techniques might yield awesome results.
Love you, Persy~
PM me with questions or to talk!
To me this poem really seems to meander around what it wants to get at. At first, I felt like each section was about something different, either something deeper, or a different aspect of this speaker's life, but the last two confused me. It no longer felt like these were multiple sections, but one section that needed more than just a stanza to divide it.
The key difference for me between what you did in the first/second and the rest of them is the language. To begin with, we're hearing something that is either a complete lie to appease someone, or the absolute honest truth. Either this speaker played with eating disorders, or they actually have problems with eating. The next section confirms in part that this person actually has problems with eating, but it doesn't do it by directly talking about eating disorders, instead it talks about mirrors. This added element really helped bring out the different sections for me and make them completely their own instead of just another stanza tacked on with a numbering system.
Now, in the next sections, you don't really bring up something new like that. You don't start a new conversation at the beginning of the new section. Instead, you continue the conversation from the section before it. For me, this made me dismiss that these were different sections all together I'd suggest perhaps bringing the first stanza in section iii up, to section ii, or reword it so your speaker isn't talking about 'when they talk about' which was literally a line ago. Instead, I'd suggest something like "I stutter/ on definition of less." It still brings the same idea, but it doesn't refer back to the previous poem directly in some grand revelation that we now have to hold onto in order to puzzle out the rest of the poem, which we really don't need because the speaker puzzles it out for us quite nicely.
I'm a little confused about this line in section iv: "if I am can leave the house"
Is it supposed to have both am and can?
I love the way your speaker talks about her body, and the different ways she's come to describe herself in her head. It really brings an element to the poem of living with this sort of mind set for me. Nice job ^^