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Anorexic by Eavan Boland
Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it.
Yes I am torching ber 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 the 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 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 more days sinless, foodless,
I will slip back into him again as if I had 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.
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