i'll never be a poet

sagittarius a*

there once was a little girl who had a hole in her belly.

from the outside, you couldn't tell- shimmering silk loosely dangled over her frame where Hebe had stumbled upon a star and spilled the Via Lactea from her cup, dousing the little girl in starry milk that disguised the big black hole in her stomach.

no one would have thought such a small little girl, dressed to the nines in shifting pearly drapes with iridiscent flecks of glitter swirling and winking as she walked past on her Way, harboured a hidden gaping stomach cavity. this big hole in her belly would growl and grumble with every step she took, a horrible twisting guttural groan that rose to her ears. i must be very, very, very hungry, she thought to herself, and so she proceeded to eat to fill up her empty hole.

she bit into the earth's moon, expecting chunks of spiced aged gouda to ricochet off the walls of her teeth and tongue. but the moon was just a grey crumb that disappeared into her hole without a trace.

she stabbed a straw made of light into the earth's bedrock ocean floor and slurped up all the earth's salty ocean stores in a single drop. the fish and whales and alien creatures from the bottom of the sea were miscrocopic organisms coagulated together in a great big whoosh and tickled her throat like vitamin water. they descended into her hole, nothing more than a droplet of oceanic mist.

she scraped off the earth's crust with her fingernails, shovelling grass and trees and animals and humans and buildings and miscellaneous infrastructure into her waiting mouth. she peeled off layers of molten magma, peridotite, magnesium silicate, nickel, iron, swallowing a whole earthy cake down into her hole where it vanished into oblivion.

she inhaled gas giants, jupiter and saturn, feeling the rush of wind barrel through her digestive system. the only things that came out of it were two enormous belches that bubbled right back up out of her surprised mouth, while her belly was void of air.

she gobbled up oven-baked planets, mercury and venus and mars and 51 peg and kepler 16-B and 55 cancri E, warm cakey goodies peristaltically squeezed down her throbbing pipe, heat blooming vertically down her body and warming her bones. they all ended up in the same whirring black hole, blended into nothingness in an instant.

she lapped up suns and stars of every size and colour, burning gold and searing blue and scalding red and even the dimming dwarfs, ghost pepper balls rolling on her pink tongue, stinging her sinuses and tear ducts. the heat was explosive and felt magnanimous in her mouth- surely it would bloat her belly! but they fell straight through her hole, while her mouth remained blistered and burnt, tendrils of pale smoke escaping her cracked lips.

she sucked on globes of ice to soothe her scalded tongue, uranus and neptune and pluto and ganymede and enceladus and triton, and dropped them down her open oesophagus like cold smooth marbles. they plopped into her belly-hole and the little girl felt a whizz of frosty air trailing behind each one, but felt nothing after.

she licked her stardusted lips, laid down on the barren universe's floor and began to cry. i ate everything, and yet, i feel like i have nothing, she wailed. she cried and cried and cried and her sparkling tears trickled down her wet cheeks, past her milky neck and ivory collarbone, past her glassy torso, pooling round the edges of the gargantuan black hole she held in her body. her glitter tear droplets froze into hard orbs, and slowly but surely, the planets and stars and moons she consumed were reappearing, dotting the ominous black entrance to her black hole. when the little girl saw the twinkle of the re-made universe in the corner of her glossy eyes, she cried even harder.

oh, my, cooed a gentle honeyed voice, what do we have here? the little girl looked up and saw, through her bleary red eyes, a beautiful young woman bearing a brassy golden cup in one hand.

i have a big black hole in my stomach, miss Hebe, the little girl sniffed, and i can't seem to fill it up, no matter how much i eat. she pinched the corners of her galaxial silk wrap and gingerly lifted it up to show the beautiful young cup-bearer the evidence.

the cup-bearer took one long look, and a waning smile stretched across her rosy lips. darling, perhaps eating is not the way fill up this dreadful cavity of yours. she brought a marble hand up to her chest. it might have something to do with here.

the little girl was puzzled, but she looked down anyway, and gasped. her belly had no hole- it was covered with a plump layer of flesh, flashes of celestial light glowing underneath where she had filled up her stomach with space matter. instead, her eyes came to rest upon a big black hollow, spinning in her chest where her heart once was.

(inspired by danielle pioli's comic on binge eating- "cleo had a hole in her belly")