Mental Health Matters, Part Two: Hunger Strike

As promised, part two of our series, a short poem about anorexia. Being skinny is a dream that too many people believe will solve the deep sadness; many members of my family, including myself, and too many friends have struggled with that belief as well. May you find hope beyond self-harm. For free books about bulimia, please see Feed The Whales.

An Afternoon in the Green

I

II

Luminosity, pt.II

I

II

III

This Week in Elephant Ears–via the PlantLady

The Watermelon Sky

The last winter of our youth, you and I
Walked across snowy and forgotten lands
Where in yours you took my tired, small hands
And came upon a Watermelon Sky.
Pure, solid pink until the horizon,
Like inside your mouth, like under your skin,
Like your patience wearing a little thin,
The deep red membrane we set our eyes on.
Then we turned to see the blues of the moon:
Soft aqua and turquoise fading to white
By the single star that’s been out tonite.
The choice to live is ours; morning is soon.

And though our hearts may be black like its seeds,
We will remain true wherever it leads.

Hulga’s Gift

Hulga the Angel descends in the dark.
Her stump leg scrapes the ground. She knows full well
Her presence brings no peace nor chastity.
Not here, not anymore. Because I am
Re-stitching this dress, pulling out the seam.
For each knot I tie, the tighter will be
My new skin, adjusted by the years
To fit over new curves, new bones, break new hearts.
Let down the hem, iron out the creases:
This chocolate silk dress is yours. I made it
For you. Time only makes my blood run cold
And memory gets richer with heat, with want.

Hulga points to a violin player.
She says, “Maybe this was the only man
You ever really loved. And even then
It was only your desire you loved.”
It is more than just her name that is ugly.
It is my shame, my lust, that in itself
Makes my identity, summer after
Summer. Put on my dress, cut by a bow.
Measure my life against the day we met.

There will always be death in this body.
Hold it close, embrace wounded memory.
Truth is embedded in divine flesh. Yours.
I will hear your music for my whole life
And I will remember your tenderness,
Part of me forever, like a stump leg.
If you see me haunting your dreams, or don’t,
Whether you can or cannot forget me;
I will wear this dress with everything
I ever wanted in you or in him.

Hulga points to a reveling sinner.
She says, “Maybe this was the only man
You ever really wanted. Even still
It was only yourself that you needed.”

Mon Petit Mort

Now into this life I see
The shape of you across my bed:
You are the Little Death of me.

The city spread out like the sea,
You reached to the wound in my head.
Now into this life I see.

Whate’er touch meant—my want—only
Love not your wife; choose me instead.
You are the Little Death of me.

Consume my heart entirely.
All words are for my Belovéd.
Now into this life I see.

Our bodies shake; we are set free
From the past. Shame and guilt are shed.
You are the Little Death of me.

A world apart from pain, we
Awaken ourselves from the Dead:
Now into this life I see
You are the Little Death of me.

Excerpt from “Paradise Within”

Dreams of Vincent

Steepletop, New York: 1949

Decline to put life into fourteen lines:

Edna St. Vincent Millay walks in her garden, the path worn smooth now, after years of

loving and living so well.

Seven hundred acres of grass softened into mud, feet slipping across dew to the secret

cabin. The secrets of this woman, hidden in the forest, in her writing fortress,

secret words and secret lovers;

Roses and honeysuckle separated by time lines—

When did you plant this one, and this, this too?

Measuring your life by the flowers underfoot.

She writes an illegible scrawl, dictating her last will and testament, her eyes dripping

Morphine and her stomach bloated with unborn children, her head aching and her

liver ruined by drink & sleeping pills & painkillers &—

Her heart broken amongst the poets of Europe and her lovers lost in literary magazines of

witty irony, forgetting everything except these cruel letters of having and not,

Her sexual frustration burned into an ivory dildo that horrified darling sister, now too

tired to rub as she once had, and their morals shocked at the abandonment of

acceptable social behaviour,

(Naughty Vincent! Nude photographs for Norma’s grief!)

Her stomach wrenching and her fingers shaking, she counts her drinks and records her

cigarettes; who else is there to do it now? He’s gone and been gone, been gone

and gone—

She writes & she writes, the Pulitzer next to notebooks, pages and pages scattered across

the hard wood around her bed, lying with the intravenous pierced into my heart;

But in the beginning, and the night until the end,

Your red hair shines, Vincent.

You stand at the bedside revealed, asking, asking just this once, and you are more

beautiful now than in all the past.

Camden, Maine: 1892

A tiny baby to Cora Millay, bringing the love her husband would and had abandoned.

Two more to follow, these girls watching their eldest sister protect and comfort dearest

mother, beloved teacher of all things sweet and right.

On the seashore where the rockweed grows, you play the princess, you define the

prowess of life to come: prowler of the mainland, encourage the ever-brightening

flame!

And begin to make sketches, poems written in half-letters for Cora, Norma, and

Kathleen, the beautiful girls shaping your life’s roots; begin loving them through

your words, begin turning into the storm that will overtake this war-torn & jazz-

riddled America.

Shakespeare took your breath away.

His sonnet is no rival to your own.

You learn & you learn, each editor fancied whose fondness for you becomes piety—bow

down before the young student, eager to be such a lover, to dance the Renascence.

New York City, New York: 1920

Serenading, smoking, seducing; a ghost of the determined heart privately shattered and

disillusioned by politics; a mind too clever and whimsical, bestowing grace upon

your drama queens and magic dreams; coyly, fiercely, teeth set into the poems—

Reading deep and slow, deliberately: “Is that really my voice? Quite lovely, isn’t it?”

Pitying you not, they fell in love, confessed it and sent it, little packaged tokens of desire

which passed for you most casually. Swooning turned to devotion and possession,

men of newspapers and women of Vassar all contented and condemned to lie at

your feet.

At the party, paired with the most handsome man in the room—Eugen, love of your

life—and of all those competing, he won the prize; married in a hamlet far away

from the big city, sisters at your side, mosquito netting in your hair.

Loving him, twelve years your senior, weak and pleased, planting the seeds of life,

beginning together, planning to reap what you sow.

Or in Boston seven years later, walking the death row picket line, wooden letters of

protest on your shoulder, arrested, harassed by Republicans, thrown into a jail cell

to confirm your commitment—to ensure your heart’s dedication—sitting on the

cold floor that night, tired & tried, do you still believe as you did? Do they see it

at all?

Or does the girl poet disappear in the morning?

What lips your lips have kissed, and here, and why;

But laughing on the beach, sand in your skin, you were happier than ever before, no

matter how many men.

Sanibel Island, Florida: 1936

To the shoreline, wind whipping, seagulls crying, your legs strain to run against the

thirteen thousand miles distance home—

Turn back, see flames.

Every word you wrote has changed into ash.

What kind of memory do you have, Vincent? Were you able to set down everything

you’d missed, letter by letter, player by player? When you think of the rude fire,

Do you think of yourself stepping into it, walking through the blaze; do you think of

yourself becoming the inferno, the orange flames licking singes of your hair—you

are scarred, burned, remember each sentence as it should remain in your head;

branded black spots on your fingers from the pen’s ink, the rhyme repeating itself

and you turn over in bed.

Is this when you truly rise up, when you set free your call? Though the pain you will

suffer—remembering, writing, your arms weak and your nerves pinched, falling

out of moving automobiles, used up by life—though you will suffer pain, your

grasp on the heart of Bohemia is loosened forever this time as you leave behind

the earthly place.

This is when you left us, long before real death. After such a truth with Ugin, it was

impossible to enter that which we inhabited; you made the world your own

because it is difficult to live as others do, it is difficult to live—

So carve letters in and find home with him;

Immortal as the words you engrave,

Hold them to your pale throat.

Steepletop, New York: 1950, 2006

Edna St. Vincent Millay walk in her favourite garden as best she can. Sickness and grief

have slowly warped her body to a shape dimly reminiscent of herself, of the

century’s treasured poetess who cast spells on her readers, her devotees, her

friends, her family.

Your tiny lyrics were already wrapping the world round before this day came, before you

ever fell in love with him. Can you hear us at all? Telling you to stay?

Stay with me.

And all I could see from where I stood

Was you, standing on the stair below me, offering a hand.

It would be so easy to follow.

I dream of the written life and the imagined one, of where you really are and what you

really were; of you in the seeping darkness of these nights—I dream.

As dawn starts to break, decline to put life into fourteen lines:

See an image of a girl I know, see a silhouette of Steepletop against the sky.

A Moral Duty

I.

No one knows anymore for whom to pray;
Or to, or why, or give me reason, how
To accept what you’re fighting against now
Because it’s any time, it’s any day:
Stitch shards of shrapnel away and allow
War to not be mine. But to me you say,
I am chosen, I will be there someday;
And gently I wipe the blood from your brow.

Challenge to my heart, turn my peaceful mind,
Watch gas holding your throat in yellow choke,
Wonder, is this really how truth comes through?
You say, a soldier knows his way though blind.
But if you go up in a cloud of smoke,
Would the president change it all for you?

II.

I placed faith in peaceful measure until
I met the Military Man one night,
With a smile so charming he just might
Bring Afghanistan to a sharp standstill.
He and I battled, though on the same side;
He through the army and I by my words,
To find our own peace; so scatter the birds
As the blast carves in the greatest divide.

It occurred to me that you’re going to die,
Your dog tags broken, mouth set to swallow;
You will be happy, serv’d your country well.
Next to a land mine your body will lie,
And grief will come, though no peace will follow.
And if all is in vain, no one can tell.