Take Me Home (Original Poems)

Pretty Girls - Poem 77

These are not monsters, there are no monsters here.

This feels much like love,

And when they creep into your head

it is like something that has been missing is finally home.

How could you call it a monster when it makes such pretty girls?

Pretty girls,

Pretty skinny girls,

Who look like everything.

Every single thing that is wonderful about being alive,

Like vodka diet cokes,

And the pictures of hip bones at the beach,

And all I've eaten for the past three days has been my fingernails

And these monsters

Not monsters-

Can make you pretty too.

You will learn that you need to make jokes about why you're slicing five strawberries

you brought for lunch,

And breakfast and dinner

Into thirty-five pieces.

Lifting the small pieces from folded napkin

With cracking fingers

To a very hesitant tongue.

And when the jokes get to be just too much for you,

And taste too much like nourishment on your dry tongue,

Like letting everything go,

Like bliss,

You will learn to put an end to your lunches,

Forget what lunch even consists of.

And by your senior year in high school,

You will know every place in the school building

Where nobody will ask you where your friends are

And why you look so tired.

The monsters,

Not monsters-

Will share their secrets.

You'll learn that mineral pills,

When crushed into a fine paste

and shook into the fifteen bottles of water you were going to drink that day

Tastes just like lemonade

Sweet, sweet lemonade

And you can have a sip

For only the small cost of the rest of your life spent feeling the hollow, emptiness in your stomach.

Searching up number

And number

And dead girl

And number.

The calculator never stops,

don't worry about forgetting that oh so many calories

Are in that cracker you just placed on your trembling tongue.

You, too, can walk the halls for the rest of your day

Smelling of what you just scrubbed off the bathroom floor.

Go they say,

Outstretching their beautifully manicured hands,

Such small, bottle cap wrists-

Memorize menus

All the pain will stop once you do this.

And all those lies you can tell will keep everyone from asking those questions.

Spending hours at the store counting

Fifty calories,

One hundred calories,

Two hundred calories,

No more than three hundred

Or else suddenly your thighs will begin to grow in size like the balloons

Of all the birthday parties you could never attend.

Though, you always apologize.

You will learn to always avoid celebration

No matter the situation

Because celebration equal food.

You will spend Christmas dreaming

Of burying your weak teeth into your bony knuckles until your heart finally stops.

The not-monsters will place that first cigarette in your shaking palm

And second,

And your tenth.

They will leave your once silky hair in a knotted wad on your pillow,

Just for you to find the next morning.

And when your body becomes too weak,

It starts to shiver and quiver in even the warmth,

But where the sickness breaks your skin roses will grow.

So beautiful

So painful

An entire flourishing garden will force itself from your empty stomach

Emerging out your mouth

And you will choke

But you will be happy

Because the worst thing you could be doing is eating.

You will decompose over time

You will not be able to be differentiated from all the skeletons that live in your closet

Don't you wish you could shrink

Don't you wish you had that kind of control

Don't you wish you could actually make your mother cry

Because she just doesn't get why you'd do this

Because that would mean that she would finally care.

You don't even get why you do this

And maybe it's because you just don't care about what is happening to you,

Because it feels so good-

And you are smart

Though, you just googled how many calories are in your toothpaste.

The pretty girls

Pretty skinny girls

Pretty dying girls

Pretty dead girls

The monsters

Not monsters-

Can be restrained but not destroyed.

Only if you really want that.

But no matter.

It is a beautiful thing to be of an empty stomach,

Head full of numbers and calculations.

The picture of your well defined hip bones at the beach was well worth all this.