Born a magazine baby

someone cut me out for a collage

two-toothed, glossy letters

stamped across the back of my neck like

an antique doll’s watermark

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My Own Elegy, or, April Again

Springtime isn’t anyone else’s wound—

and nobody is better at being sullen

on the sidewalk than me,

my spinal column the loneliest white flower

forcing my foxglove face to tilt towards the sun.

I stop walking halfway home.

Walking is hard work when your skeleton’s

climbing out of your pink dress’s

peter pan collar eager

to make …

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“….The heart of a swan is a swan.”

I cut out my own violent shape,

traced along the edge of new cardstock.

The heart is something children make each

other by unfolding and

opening

finger-smudged in their laps from

getting passed around before the party.

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This hospital room, lit by lighting.

This radio-static arrhythmia,

this rounding doctor with his wrinkled white coat

who cannot hear my heartbeat over the next thunderclap.

I snatch his stethoscope, press the shining diaphragm to the window

listen to the perfect pounding pulse

rain against…

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Pseudo-awareness, tied up in grossly misused buzzwords all over the internet, TikTok in particular, where product-pushing individuals assert that every ex is a narcissist, every compliment is love-bombing, and any inconvenient or upsetting is trauma, it becomes a problem to parse the level of pathology assigned to the human experience. The same assertion that we, as a society, should be talking about panic attacks, or feeling too apathetic to brush our teeth for weeks, and even the traffic circle between sobriety and addiction, discussion of eating disorder remains surface-level, aimed at Bella Hadid and Barbie, and fails to educate those who are unaware of just how pervasive a disease like anorexia nervosa can be.

Every time I attempt to educate others about the experience of life with an extreme, disabling eating disorder—every single time—I get an email. I get a kickback. “Help if available, someone is concerned, call this hotline, talk to someone.” It glitches every time, no matter which option I select. I am twenty-eight years old. Telling me to “get help” is equivalent to spitting in my face. What help? People who watched me grow up, teachers, trusted club sponsors who spoke so highly of my precocious promise, quietly judge my aging parents for “allowing” me to deteriorate at an unlivably low bodyweight. To this I raise the challenge; if I were your daughter, what would you do with me? You can’t know. You can never know. I get told to cover up, don’t scare the children. Don’t go out in public. Yes, people are. Yes, I receive messages that I should be ashamed of myself any time I share a photo online, even of my face. I am not championed in recovery spaces. There are no spaces for people like me. Harm reduction, taboo in the world of addiction, remains unthinkable to most except in very protected subsets of the medical literature for eating disorders. People who claim to love me tell me this is what I chose.

Let me be clear; anorexia is not a choice. I would have chosen anything else.

Talking about mental health, even on the very rudimentary level that we are, is still progress. That being said, when we leave out individuals with “uglier” mental health issues such as schizophrenia, manic depressive, anorexia, bulimia, and the entire spectrum of eating disorders, people who are visibly struggling in ways that make the average person uncomfortable, we deny these individuals their humanity. We otherize and ostracize people who may not possess the kind of recovery capital necessary to live full lives according to narrow, traditional definitions. Conversations about mental health should not exclude anyone. People must be given permission to exist in community, regardless of the feelings this may be bring up in the community at large. Everyone deserves agency, even if makes you angry.

Everyone’s story matters.

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Gravel showers the windshield

of pollenated pick-up

shining bed and body black as the bible,

body in the passenger seat frail as

faith. Forest fires rage on up north,

not here at home

the shroud of truth covers me with

second-hand smoke and second-hand

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When I am home, pinks crawl up the grass by the mailbox, earth a blushing ingenue learning her lines. I get a lot of cards. I keep them all. It has been a long time now, a year. I've always thought of daylight savings as lonely, that long slant of march light the yellow ribbon I tie up in my hair. I consider planting some seeds, decide against it when it starts to rain. Maybe I'll buy myself flowers tomorrow, or maybe I'll figure out what to do with this sudden sort of warmth. Over and over, the world falls open like a library book, spine loosened with love, and I sit and read the story of everything. Everything changes but time. I remember you. Maybe that's as important as love.

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After “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

My mother’s milk is space dust, its own element.

I suckle her mercury, and it makes me into an alien.

I speak a language nobody knows

and never grow up.

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December Wednesday, walking home from the coffee house blue as folklore,

as fairytale, clouds hanging low and limp like unclaimed coats

Solstice’s Lost and Found

Blue as fingers, lips,

mouth

open, an oval, a grave—

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Five stages of grief, ten circles of Hell, How Would You Rate your Pain, but no one believes you when you say it is unbearable. Virginia Woolfe went to the river laden with stones, but hands in my pockets, all my fingers find is a flask sloshing with the dregs of dreams that I don’t drink. On my walk to Denial, I enter an elevator that only goes up, each identical floor it opens to gleaming fluorescent as yearning and populated by the nightstands of everyone I’ve ever known, pill bottles rattling with blue capsules of sleep, or aspirin, it’s hard to say—water glasses and reading glasses and wilting flowers, all things The Living acquire. No one is here, in Denial, except all of us, rummaging through drawers of darkness for some kind of cure. I find a sachet of want, tied tight in two knots at the top, filled with the pressed purple blossoms of breath.  I call out every name I can think of, but no one comes near me until I reach the entrance to Anger, down a spiral staircase made of hair and bone, into our old apartment, every surface covered in pictures of you, and me, and me and you. You are watching me through the window. I call out to you over and over, but you appear not to hear me, not even when I scream and thrash and look for something to break the glass with. You look right through me, waving my arms and sobbing and pressing my face against the cool glass. I wonder if the moment will come when you walk through the door, carrying my sorrow limp in your arms like a cat, self-domesticated. Rattling the doorknob, I know that living or dead, even if I see you again, I will never see you again.

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I sleep fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours in a day, both because I am tired and because I am searching for, if not some tonic cure for the cold, proof, something dried up I can scoop up and carry home in my skirt gathered up like a school satchel.

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November, the toothy mutt,

nips at my ankles as I carry the discount tulips

I bought for myself at the supermarket into the kitchen

Bouquet cradled carefully as the cat I once found

runover by a Honda Civic.

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Heaven’s Hat Rack

(In loving memory of Paige Gong 1992-2019)

I.                

Dropping my pennies every Sunday into the offering plate,

I know better than to ask my grandmother

pleather purse clutched close on her lap

if God ever gives anything back.

God, maybe a neighbor with a big black dog,

God, maybe a hitchhiker with axle grease under his thumbnail

waiti…

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