Breasts, Thighs, and other Disgusting Foods

So I learned to become this

California poppy

Seed muffin

Cute as a pink cocktail, chilled, sweating,

And twice as dangerous when had on an empty stomach

I feel eyes, searching noses

On my box of Girl

Scout cookies ripped open

Tears fall at the sight of my

Spilled milk

A porcelain cookie jar aching with regret

And one million attempts at optimism

Swan throat, feathering thoughts, white knuckles

Gritted my teeth through this doctor’s appointment of a life

Strawberry short stack,

I have been forked

And knifed in the back

Hands sticky with my own syrup on my favorite kind of afternoon

My daydreams are the color of a black widow’s teeth

My skin and my conscience stained

With room temperature champagne

And jam

I put the gore in gourmet really,

And to ask for a a to-go box hardly seems necessary

Because You're Worth It

The glitter, the glimmer, regurgitated gummy bears

In a pristine toilet in the absinthe bar

Brightly colored rainbow sludge: sticky slime

Shiny, the red ones shone like brand new blood

The kind that comes

Fast and frightening, sweet and seasoned

With thick white spit

Tasting a warm, almost hot, mushy apple, in reverse

The bullshit problems of a skinny white girl

Barfing up her hips

Barfing up her last name

Replacing it with the slop

Sound of a bag of candy gone, unswallowed

In one hundred and twenty seconds

Teeth and claws, and collarbones

That’s what little girls are made of

Made up in red lipstick,

As made up as a story book

Beat myself up, beat myself open

A piñata exploding, soggy confetti

A million colors, so bright you can’t see

The glamor brought me to my knees, I worshiped myself

Played God with my stomach, made God out of my skeleton

And I didn’t listen

To my own whimpering prayers

My Lazy Veins, my Voodoo Doll Body, for Sherri

Hospital trip #2 was an underwhelming whisper:

What I remember most was my acceptance, my admittance

Arms and palms upturned, like a glimmering soft virgin

Hands empty, arms fluid, limp as an old ragdoll with eyes missing,

With dirt rubbed into her

Pale fabric cheeks, yarn hair ripped out in obvious places, as a result

Of too    much   love

The doctor said, you are going to feel

Cold; doctors always describe feelings as nouns, which is what they are anyway

I wanted to murmur that I knew

The drill as he stuck a thick rushing needle

Deep and hard into my half-ass veins

Where the blood was your favorite color

A purple haze that I could see through

Glowing weakly underneath smooth pale white cold

The nurse laid a blanket at my feet that I pretended not to need and

I showed a similar attitude toward your manicured hand

But as that water that was inserted into me spread

I shivered a breath through embarrassed tears and you

Asked me if it hurt, this woman who had felt iodine burn

But never the frozen sting of

Everything I Ever Needed

That I had denied myself

Was as obvious, as black and white as hospital bills

I cried then because I was sorry,

And I cried because that’s what I said the last time I got away with it