Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self-denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now that bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in my sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few days
sinless, foodless.
I will slip
back into him again
as if I have never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
-Anorexic, by Eavan Boland