I find detox tea in the back of my mother’s cabinet
& suddenly we are both teenage girls
comparing waistlines in the bathroom mirror
my mother – hard from the years, yoga pants 5 days out of the week,
who doesn’t believe for one second in all that
“beauty advertising propaganda”
is suddenly soft
is insecure
I find detox tea in the back of my mother’s cabinet
& I am fifteen again
throwing up after dinner
sometimes real life is too human for poems
& I am only now learning to take up space
I say I am healed now
because my dinner no longer looks like numbers
like regret
but the truth is I still lift my shirt in the bathroom sometimes
enamored by my own smallness (on the good days)
there are moments that my worth lies
in the flatness of my stomach
They say that it is harder to recover
from an eating disorder than a drug addiction
that this willful hunger will take half of its victims
to their graves
Yesterday in an empty subway cart
I saw a woman spread out across three seats
& I think of how different we are.
It’s like that, I think
when you are used to being made smaller
you stay small even when there is room.
Today I am growing
& I mean that is every sense.
I can look in the bathroom
& see only a bathroom
not another way to lose the calories.
I can look at fat
& see all the ways I have chosen to love myself
rather than a reason not to.
There are the days I stand in front of a mirror
& count all the ways I could shrink
& then there are the days I see
the closed up scars
& the stretch marks
& all the ways I tried to die but didn’t
There are days I look at my body
& see only healing
Poems 