Anorexia Nervosa

 

i

 

Now that it’s fall, they’ve hauled

their difficult beauty—all sharp edges

and shiny joints—back onto campus.

 

Before our eyes, they’re changing

into something no one understands

but them and the other members

 

of their strange clan. Gleeful hoarders,

clandestine calculators, secretly they subtract

themselves, calorie by calorie, crumb

 

by crumb, gram of fat by gram

of fat—disappearing in plain sight, devouring

themselves by devouring nothing . . .

 

Poured perfectly into brief skirts

and tight capris, their taut flanks

and ridged bellies ripple beneath

 

the wandering hands of fleshy boys

in caps worn backwards. On party

nights, barely anything’s required

 

to get them drunk. And so they dance,

flying high above the earthbound burden

of the tiny bodies they’re dying to erase.

 

In the cafeterias, they perch among us,

primeval, girl-size birds of prey, nibbling

skittishly on leftover bits that anyone

 

else would throw away. Visualize

a vulture and its ducked, pink head, targeted

on lunch, and you’ll see the similarity

 

—bony shoulders hunched above almost

empty trays, hooded eyes, claw-like

fingers pecking at undressed bowls

 

of salad greens. They must be starving.

That’s the trite thought that fills our heads

as we stuff ourselves, looking away to avoid

 

the violence their images discharge—the sharp

angles and dessicated volumes of shed flesh,

the vacant bellies and caved-in cheeks

 

they slash us with . . .

 

 

ii

 

Some girls tat themselves up to mark

their difference—and walk about that way,

flaunting the world’s girl-shaming, persecutory gaze,

 

egging it on, using their bodies to invite altercations

they’re confident they’ll win. The starving girls

size it up differently, their fragilities lacking

 

the right words to say it. What use are words

when so many can’t read, others won’t,

and almost no one cares anymore

 

for carefully crafted utterance . . . Images

still slay however, driving themselves deep

in the center where language peters out

 

and words merge new territories, spreading

into flat puddles, all color and shape. What can’t

be given voice still announces itself in other mediums:

 

Painted or draped on the human body.

Or carved into a girl’s sweet flesh with a straight

edge blade she’s hidden in the bathroom

 

and takes to herself, after vomiting

her dinner.

 

 

iii

 

Some madness—is divinest sense.

The Divine Miss D. opined this, waxing psychoanalytic

decades before Freud’s famous theory.

 

It fills my head now—the sense in madness,

the madness in sense—as my student sits

beside me, protesting her right to have an opinion.

 

This is probably wrong, she says. Probably

stupid, twisting her hair, and shrinking back

in the chair I have positioned so close

 

She won’t be able to escape when I need

to remind her she’s more than her body.

 

 

iv

 

Mommy, what is my mind?

My daughter asked me

When she was three.

 

Strapped in her car seat.

Tapping her temple

As I sometimes do

 

When I’m writing

A poem, or trying

To think.

 

A kind of machine,

Was what I said.

You can use it

 

To build things.

Like ladders,

Or cars.

 

 

v

 

Journal excerpts, over the years . . .

 

Why has miniaturization mostly been a woman’s art?

 

*

 

What exactly is the male attraction to the 20-inch waist?

 

*

 

Keeping things small, and manageable: that’s

one way I’ve kept breakdown at bay.

 

*

 

Sometimes life is too large to even imagine

what might be required to extract oneself

from the master plot.

 

*

 

Found Sonnet from November 9, 1999

 

Today, ____ , my favorite student in poetry class,

Fainted in my office. One second, she was upright,

Discoursing on the unexpected pleasures

Of Frost’s blank verse. The next, her eyelids

Retracted in her head. Hands twitching,

She fell from her chair, and slid to the floor

And I thought she was dead. Before I reached her,

She was coming back, apologizing. (They always do

Apologize.) “I’m sorry, Professor,” she kept on saying.

“I haven’t eaten a thing today. My parents are paying me

A lot of money to lose some weight before the break.

We’re going on a cruise with my stepfather’s family.”

 

Then she made it worse: “And they’re all very thin.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she apologized again.

 

*

 

In the course called “Existentialism,” the exam was only two questions:

 

1. Define dread.

2. Describe horror.

 

*

 

For god’s sake, stop rubbernecking, and read the text!