ANOREXIC.

A GIRL WITH ANOREXIA AND HER PERSPECTIVE.

No one will believe
How fat you are, they’re
Always on about the thin

Edge of the bones and pale
Skin; always asking you to
Eat, to fill out the flesh more,

And, oh you do look ill, and
Sex is a right turn off, Baxter
Says. The whole show one big

Put off; the mirror never lies,
The fat girl looking back, the
Flabbiness, the bulging cheeks,

The eyes bigger than the belly
Father says, mocking, never
Serious, Mother stern ever

Spying, always lying, too thin,
Look at yourself, Mother says.
The whole panorama of mirrored

Selves proves them wrong, and
The big b***h in the mirror staring
Back at you, her fat features, the

Sour sickly grin; never going to
Lose her, never be right, never lose
The flabbiness, never going to be thin.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

We live in a world here everything is base on beauty. Hard for the children to understand what is real or not. Poem is powerful. Your description made the story come alive. A excellent poem.

Coyote

[just rose.]

What's interesting here is that you're almost writing it from the perspective of the mirrored projection as if the small voice inside has been drowned out by all the others. That is an interesting take on this even though you do give an internal view of the narrator's thoughts, it's almost as if she's just reciting a litany of what others think, which, of course, is partly the point. Anorexia has by some experts been described a specialized subset of obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have had my entire life (the latter, not the former). One of the arguments for this notion is that the control mechanism is expressed through food and eating rather than by washing your hands or whatever (this is a rather vulgar and imprecise explanation but relevant for this review). What I'm thinking in this piece of yours is that the element of control is almost hidden by this narrator, and so that creates a subtext for the poem which is extremely interesting and calls into question larger themes of self-image and self-reflection. Really well done, as always.