literature

brittle

Deviation Actions

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Literature Text

01.

the mirror smiles
as she cracks her teeth
with insults like mints
on a shrivelled tongue:
somewhere, inside,
she is marking out
imperfections with
permanent ink.

there's a tape measure
around her waist,
and she doesn't know
where it came from.


02.

the floor creaks under bare
feet – her weight must
be rocketing into the sky,
she supposes –
and when the numbers flash
across her eyes,
she pins them with silver
needles to her limp
eyelashes,

so that way she'll never
forget if a knife
twists her gut,
if a rational voice speaks
in her ear and begs
her to please,
please

eat


03.

there are better things in
life, she tells herself
with a light flickering in
her brain, like the warning
sign where the train tracks cross
the road.


04.

her days are black and white
because the colour has
been swallowed down the
throat of an illness.

she blends water with sleep
and presents the perfect
combination in cupped hands
as though she
might be applauded.
but no one is there to see
and that is just the
way she likes
it.


05.

her feet are poised on sharp-
tipped knives, her lips crease
downwards, her fingers
are knobbly.
gravity likes to drag
the skeleton from the coat-
hanger it used to command in
a wood-panelled closet
and crush it
to the ground.

walking is a dizzy affair
and her nails have been chewed
down as far as they go –
and in some distant
reality, her bones extract
themselves from underneath
tissue skin
and cry hello to a
dim world.


06.

she has toothpick legs –
only her eyes are broken, the
needles like silver
eyelashes with flexibility
issues –
and

if she counts her ribs one
more time, scouring the visible
bars, she
might find spiders
in the cracks.


07.

everyone around her
decorates the word eat
into the outside of
her skull;

but it can't rewire her
brain.


08.

her days
are
stop-start,
blurred around
the edges,
her voice
fuzzy in between
thin lips.


09.

she counts from the
number she sits on
down down down to zero
as she steps
up
and then down
and then up
and then down

in the middle of the night.
and she maps her future in
calories and secrets
everyone but she can
see.


10.

one day,
she writes furiously,
she'll eat a whole plate and
her stomach will not

explode.
this is number one for my mental disorders poetry series.
I don't know how many of those I'm going to write, but probably a lot...

anorexia nervosa: an eating disorder characterised by excessive food restriction, an irrational fear of gaining weight and a distorted body self-perception.
more info

sometimes i hate recovery.
© 2012 - 2024 jikivigoig
Comments2
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featherback's avatar
This is heartbreakingly beautiful. You portrayed the disorder very well. <3