The Backbone

 Tonight, we dance with hunger

I seem to be forever writing on my body

in invisible ink, hoping the outlines

will stay and my edges disappear.

Aching nights spent denying nourishment

and the acknowledgement of my own pain.

It was all hollowed out outer hip creases

and concave geometric equations.

The stretched band of my Calvin Klein’s.

Playing delayed gratification games.

Dipping my hands in cornflakes and

swallowing dust did nothing for my sanity.

I excavated the gaps I created

in the nursing of myself.

Tight fitting clothes, scarecrow-like

ridged paths to nowhere, my abdomen

whispering myths of control.

Now, not filling up with the

junk-food-drip of eating obsessions

I find virgin spaces to move into.

Now I’ve lost the weight of it

my personality doesn’t fit.

Tooting, London

2 December 2019

Girl’s Just Want to Have Fun

Time After Time

Part C

The spinning tyres in my sister’s bike kept grinding to the Made in Chelsea theme tune. We all left the room hoping this zombie was only another ‘stage’ she was going through and that she would find herself before there was nothing left but grating jaws of trauma.

As I sit in my highchair, Dad spoons me a yoghurt covered puzzle but it tastes like lack of control. I spit it across the room where it lands on my sister’s head. She’s old, my younger sister is so much older than me now. I see the cigarette lines pulling the corners of her smile like Mum turning down our sheets at night when we shared a room in that house. The hospital corners felt calm then.

As I age, I grow smaller, and Mum has bought me home from hospital for the second time. She places me on the kitchen counter amongst the ripening fruit and non-genetically modified vegetables from the farmer’s market. She’s preparing the roast she made last Sunday even though we’ve already eaten it. And I am hungry.

29 November 2019

The Hurst, Shropshire

Girl C

Kit Kat Clocks

I never knew the value of time

Before I started measuring myself

In six-minute units.

All the things I loved squashed up:

People, places, poetry

The way your sparrow hands fit in mine

Cold mornings with nowhere to be

The small bedroom at my grandparent’s house

Shortbread from the Malborough Spray jar

Dancing in the kitchen with the tea-towels, always,

Into someone else’s borrowed capacity.

I, always hoping it would be an oversized jumper

Not a shrunken straight-jacket.

“Is it Kit-Kat o’clock yet?” She murmurs over the desk divider.

26 November 2019

Arvon Week, Shropshire