honeysuckle: poems by colleen cosette goodman

still stuck with prufrock

Trigger warning for eating disorder stuff.

That dark is still beating under my eyes - it's a look. My aim is to be heroin chic with those pointy limbs and long hair. I'm sixteen and I'm back to my ways. Coffee is all day round. I avoid eating until I feel dizzy and fizzy and gobble up scrambled eggs. All I cook I don't eat. My best friend is thin and curvy and I envy her with a thick pasty choking that coats my throat slimy.
I am looking back at old pictures. Look how thin I was, I say, I am willing to swallow glass to be That thin again. My throat will bleed thin lines of blood and eventually I'll choke like I was meant to.
I try to fight my body with the vigilance of a woman scorned. I need control and I need it now. I suck in my stomach and pinch - stay there for minutes unbreathing, lifting inside my head and calculating and scoring.
My body is the inconvenience of the century instead of the essential organism it is
Everything with my body is
So troubling, so disastrous-
This is not a poem but a list of what my brain feels.
I think I am constantly living through my eyes because my body is not really there. Maybe I am stuck rolling up my trousers and eating a peach and talking of Michelangelo. I will never be thirteen again but god do I wish I was. 

The twenty-third of June, 2017.