there are some who want a thinner waist
and others who just don't like the taste
of food they feel they do not deserve

some eat cake with their eyes
while others are busy planning their demise
one wants to see bones, another, headstones

one could love themselves if they were just 40 pounds thinner
"maybe i'll love myself if i just skip dinner"
the other has no appetite, a battle with calories she does not fight

a battle, rather, with herself
to **** herself or stay in living hell
too preoccupied to care what is on the pantry shelf

there are some who want a thinner waist
and others who just don't like the taste
of food they feel they do not deserve

~ dad said she'd be famous ~

"...a doctor
or diva
like lena horne," he said

he'd been doing odd day jobs
and driving cabs deep into the night
through  these mean city streets
since ella's debut
at the apollo

and his smile
grew wider than
jackie o's
reservoir in central park
when this bouncing baby girl
made her grand debut
into his world

the dimples on her
cherub caramel cheeks
were irresistibly pinchable

and those twinkling eyes
knew she'd be spoiled infinitely
like a fruit-fly in a box
of rotten apples

~ reality check ~

....if you look closely
you might still see one dimple;
but the twinkles departed
back in '75

....and the burns
on her fingertips
and blistered lips

....and the bones....
jutting  like the bones
of refugees and anorexics

....missing flesh

...and the tracks
on her forearms
and filthy jeans

.....and the eyes....
shifting like the eyes
of senators and thieves

....telling lies

.....and the rotting corpse
in a black garbage bag
in fresh kills

multiple choices removed
from the doctor
and diva of daddy's dreams

hijacked by dream-killers:
smack
      crack
  and addiction

~ P (Pablo)
(8/1/2013)

"I love food too much to be anorexic.
Thats the thing,
Anorexics love food.
But with anorexia,
Food is no longer,
Texture,
Smell,
Warmth,
Energy,
Taste.
Food becomes numbers,
Calories,
1000.
800.
600.
200.
Until Calories,
Become chemicals.
Sugar Free Jelly,
Pepsi Max,
Low fat ice-cream.
...
NOTHING.

Anorexia is not about a love,
It is about a hate.
An over-whelming hatred.
For your body,
For your faults,
For yourself.

Starving is merely a symptom.
Too many work out sessions is merely a symptom.
Your thoughts are a poison.
Not your acts."

My name is Athena Grace and I have battle anorexia for 4 years.
I am 16 years old.
At the age of 12 years old my idea of beauty was constructed into something toxic.

On my 12th birthday I was 5'2 and a beautiful 134 pounds.
On my 13th birthday I was 5'3 1/2 and a sliming 112 pounds.
On my 14th birthday I was 5'5 and a stick thin 100 pounds.
On my 15th birthday I was in the hospital. I was 5'5 1/2 and 89 pounds.
On my 16th birthday I was 5'6 and 118 pounds.
I am halfway to my 17th birthday and I am 5'7 feet tall and 105 pounds.
I was getting bad again.
I refuse to get bad again.
I am my own savior, and that is what I have learned.
I will recover.
I will never look at food like you do, but that is okay.

Joy is a
drug,
and I
can't buy it.
More glamorous than
any amount
of *******
but more available
than a breath
of fresh air.
Smiles are
easier to break
than an
Anorexics bones.
Snap,
frowning faces
begin to walk
their steady pace
of
birth to coffin.

Everyone loves to talk ****
Poets
Activists
Novelists
Academics
Professors the most

Summon them up
get a consensus

(the kikuyu are a model
not the annoying vermin of the jewish suburb)

Fear is the core.
America,
Fear is yr core.

Capitalism and all its intricacies
and its lies
its imminent failure

(anorexics in red shirts laugh in hell)

Marx and Chomsky
and Precious

Open a window-
crack that-
BREAK OPEN A WINDOW IN THE WALL

let the mist leave
it will only consume you if you learn to use it instead of oxygen

A clear room will be a safe space
to paint
and film
and write
and dry off

To talk a los otros sobre Spanish y la omkeer

I proposed the theory to you once that after a certain point we are the ones that lead ourselves down that dark path. Seeking out numbing blackness because we know that it's "safe".

I don't know whether or not you believed me.

But let me reiterate it again, for myself.
'cause I really need it right now.


The first time you find yourself in the dark void, you hate it. It hurts so bad. You just want to escape. You don't speak the language and nobody seems to be able to help you or understand because you can't articulate what is wrong.  

But bulimics, anorexics, and self mutilators know that you can get use to anything. They've learned that pain is subjective. You see, repeated exposure to painful and dark things breed familiarity and comfort. And even, briefly, a deep dark happiness. A childish sticking of the tongue at the world, a ******* and a ******* to all those that hurt you. "Ha ha" you say. "Do your worst. You can't hurt me as much as I do."

For me, submerging my soul into the darkness eventually became a soothing balm. Protection from the loss of happiness, disappointment, people letting me down, friends not answering their phones, husbands being jerks, not liking myself, not liking anyone around me. Happy and joy was too big a risk. Being hurt, hurt too bad. And I would pretend to pray, I say pretend because I didn't really want help. I wanted to wallow. I wanted justification for why it was ok for me to be there. I wanted to be able to say, "this is just who I am."

I am not minimizing pain, or the people who feel it. There are a million reasons for depression and sadness. And we even need some sadness. Grief, I'm told, is a necessary part to loss although I can't fathom why right now. Why must we feel pain? Why do we have to keep on experience wrenching and heart breaking loss day after day after the day when it happened. Why I can't I c'est la ******* vie and move on?

I think because the fear of loss of people, happiness, whatever it is we are afraid of losing, is debilitating if we don't face it. If we don't throw open the cage door to the tiger(figuratively), we'll never find out that it's the fear that keeping us (me) from experiencing life. Because life is pain, just as much as it is joy. And by trying to keep pain away we end up keeping the good **** too. And looking back, all the previous pain opened doors to helping others and helping myself. Perspective man, that one day there will be sun again. There will be light hear-ted moments not over shadowed by loss. And by acknowledging it's there, we can take back the power. Because letting people hurt us is often times our fault more than theirs. And when I stop focusing on myself I can see the hurt that my "aggressor" is feeling. We are the total sum of our experiences. And we have switches, and sometimes they get flipped.

I told you about my life changing moment. The last time I sat on my porch sobbing and asking God why. The moment my prayer changed to empowerment. The moment when I asked for help.

" God, never let me go there again.'

It's a muscle. We can't control what we feel. Sometimes we ARE sad. Sometimes we ARE hurt. Sometimes we ARE reeling from inexplicable pain and loss. And it's ok. It's ok to be sad, hurt, lonely, as long as we realize it's a temporary place, not a residence.

I told you,

I had to learn to run away from the dark well of perpetual sorrow. I had to learn the bad wasn't forever, and the good was only as far away as I let it be. Like a dream catcher in reverse. I had to let all of it hit me. The good, bad, ugly, sorrow, joy, and sunlight. I had to adsorb it all, and then release the bad, negative **** that I let consume me before and enjoy the good ****, knowing I will always find more. I've got to exercise that muscle, and find relief.  


And now more than ever,
today
tonight

I need to know there is the possibility that I will be me again, and have life again.

I need to know that your absence,
is not the end.

Nineteen years it's been

And after nineteen years of learning -
Nineteen years of
see-through models,
****** magazines,
and the jutting bones of
anorexics -
  
After nineteen years of whispered hate,
I believe I have forgotten, dear Mother
what beauty is.

there are loose leaves
at the bottom of my teacup
I rarely finish drinking the thing
- instead I stare through the dark transparent liquid
at barely-floating twiggy tea leaves that
escaped from the bag
I am forgetful
and unforgiving of myself
I am too easily entranced by
lights and thin branches that dance above muddy grass
my eyes see things breathe
like marbled floors and brick buildings
I am so enraptured by rabbit fur
and tree bark
rabbits prance along the neighbourhoods
and I love the game of seeing how close I can get to them
before they leap away

when I think of bliss,
I think of not knowing what is coming next
more even, not caring

when I think of bliss,
I think of running after rabbits
or petting a tree
I do these things when no one’s looking
so no one catches the crazy in me

there are loose coffee grounds
at the bottom of my mug
caffeine kills me
and I love the taste
of the cruelty
but my body is hurting
again
like last year
where fainting and falling and confusing my words in conversation
arose every time I felt an anxious feeling
nudge its way in deeper
maybe it’s just way of giving up
my body surrendering in complete so that I feel full effect
of how badly I’ve treated it
it’s hurting again
so much that sometimes I can barely get out of bed
or get off the bus
and walk the trek home in the nippy night

I see rabbits prance along the neighbourhoods
and oh look, I am repeating myself
again
I hardly notice because my head is hurting
like there are a million and one hurricanes
inside of it
less of a crash and more like a rush
there is a difference between headaches
and light headedness
both hurt though
still I’m ashamed I’m lightheaded all the time
there is a weakness in it
that only frail people can relate to,
the scatterbrains, the unconcentrated, the anorexics, the cancer patients
the sick-of-some-sort
what am I?

sometimes, i miss being sick.

i miss the feeling of my sharp ankles on the cold scale. the scale has been hidden from my judgemental eyes.

i miss the automatic caloric calculator, the blinding neon-sign. it's still there, always and impossible to ignore, like television subtitles. but i eat anyway.

i miss the feeling of my jeans becoming baggier around pencil legs. yesterday i had to go to american eagle to buy the same pair of ripped jeans, two sizes larger than what i was a year ago.

i miss the blue polka-dot Tupperware in the farthest corner of my closet that i used to erase the shame of feeling full. i can't have containers anywhere in my bedroom.

i miss the feeling of drinking so much water that my body becomes a shallow pool that my insides float in. i have a limit on the amount of fluids i can consume in a day.

i miss walking into a meal knowing exactly how to eliminate all of it, without question. now when i do behaviors i feel the shame of my whole family in my chest.

i miss karaoke nights. i can't sing any of the songs i did in the hospital. it just feels wrong.

i miss sitting in a circle of other sick girls and forgetting, for a moment. they're in different places all over the world, enjoying life as recovered anorexics.

i miss staying up late talking to my roommate and questioning whether recovery is worth it, or even possible. she's in california with her girlfriend, enjoying being alive.

i miss licking salt of ice cubes. everything is locked into safes.

but mostly, i miss you. you're gone.

.

when people get hungry
they eat
when anorexics get hungry
they starve
when bulimics get hungry
they binge
when i get hungry
i...

i want to rip open your torso.
tear out your heart.
eat your very soul.
drink up your tears.

i want to feast.

yet i lay here.

hunger
boiling
up
slowly
getting
worse
over time.

I'm sorry, but these words aren't going to spin a story from silver or light up stars in the sky
Sometimes, the poems just can't be beautiful

Beautiful is strange in that it has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the pupils of your eyes
Like when I was little, I knew I was beautiful
Different beautiful than the other girls in my family-
Like a cherub with ringlet curls in the midst of hour-glass princesses-
But beautiful

I grew up a little and it had the opposite effect than you'd expect
Looking at my tall dancer friends somehow made me more stubbornly insistent that I was beautiful too
But differently, I noticed more now
More chest, more cheeks, all compacted into the rough shape of what a girl should be
So maybe more clasically pretty than a beauty

And then the depression, and then I lost weight
And for the first time, I could slide my hands up my sides and admit to myself that maybe they'd all been right
And that I'd been too fat and
Well, if anything good could come out of the depression it was that I was almost beautiful now,
Beautiful the way the world wanted me to be

And suddenly fear coiled around my throat, a viper paralyzing me with the idea that
I could easily fall back to before
A noose, for every time I tried to put food in my mouth

I started spending too much time by the mirror with my
shirt pulled up to my chest
So I could see the wedges of my ribs pushing through, like weeds cracking headstones at a cemetary
So I could run my hands over my collarbones and marvel at their solidity
Ignoring the cold cavern of my stomach and the shaking of my hands
Determining that 1200 calories a day was the recommendation to
lose weight at my short stature,
So I'd eat that, but somewhere in the back of my head it seemed simpler to round down to a thousand instead

You know what they say the difference between anorexia and dieting is?
They say that dieters have a goal in mind, a weight where they'll be happy whereas anorexics...
In my head, there was no goal, just less and less of me for the world to deal its deck of cards on
Because beautiful didn't matter any more and weightlessness was its replacement

I don't want to be like this
I wasted hours online, by the mirrors, shaking of cold and dizziness in my bed
I don't want to be like this
An alien structure of concavity and wasted bones the only end to this path
I refuse to be like this

I don't know if it works that way
But the laws of physics breakdown at some point anyway and so I will defy my own mind
I have watched this threat hurtle toward me, have seen it with through the pupils of my own eyes,
And it doesn't say very good things about my vision if I let myself be pushed to the side
A leaf ripped away by the wind

I will resist
I will feast on my fears
I will reclaim beautiful as my own, and project it, child-like, on every piece of my world

I refuse to be anorexic
And I will savor every taste of this life I can get
Before I die.

you heard me correctly darling when i said i was

going camping in the witherness. look in this bag i’ve already

packed sun strokes, swill trunks, an array of emptying

books and a flashlight that projects white moving dogs.

in the witherness, we stack silent burning gavels, achieving

the balance of a permanent new moon. we are arriving

by cheap chernobyl trucks and we’ll know when we’re there when

the engine dies and we open the hood to find a blanket-less

girl. don’t worry, she is environmental. made of mist.

we stomp on her sisters, **** like holy anorexics,

steady our foreheads on the ancient bark of

the witherness (dark hallways in a house of leaves)

Quiet now. lay your spine on eggshells so that your joints

may hatch asterisk chirp double asterisk something

akin to what asteroids do, but with a murmuring whistle

the only noise you can hear at the edge of the witherness.