Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless.
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
Eavan Boland
Eavan Aisling Boland
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anorexic-2/
