Porcelain
I am small
enough to ice skate over
tiny frozen waterfalls,
pirouetting along cliff sides
from the backseat of my parents’ car, dancing
circles around trees that wait
in silent urgency, decaying
leaves on their breath, sneaking into my
porcelain lungs.
I was center
stage in my own roadside
marvel, eyes peeled for eyes
peeking through thick forest, creatures
coming to observe my imaginary frolic. Yes,
I knew it was imagined, but details didn’t
matter to my audience of pine, and when I
closed my eyes, head smacking
now and then against cold window,
they still spied, a silent army in defense
of a microscopic ballerina.
Pinch
“If you can pinch more
than an inch,” my uncle laughed in the kitchen,
“it’s too much.” I was eight
years old
when I overheard these words and felt
my hands reach up and grab, like I
had been trained,
at the skin around my waist.
I heard those words one
year later as I pulled out my new
hot pink ruler with the tiny notches:
inches, centimeters, millimeters, I
marked my skin like the boys marked
their height, yard sticks
held up to the wall, standing
tall while I recoiled, drew
myself in until I was sixteen, standing
in front of my mirror with my shirt off, pinching
my stomach, my sides, my thighs,
hips too wide, breasts too small.
I kept a diary where I notched off calories, crunching
numbers on my bedroom floor counting crunches. I
followed blogs where girls like me kept
diaries, crunching celery at 100 lbs and 5’3”,
I could lose a little more.
They called it Thinspiration—a whole
community devoted
to a common goal,
where we never knew
each other but we knew
each other better than our
families, banded together, soldiers
waging war against
fat, carbs, and sugar. All
I wanted
for my seventeenth birthday
was a piece of cake.
Thinspiration: “Photographs
or other material intended to provide inspiration
for anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle
choice.” It has a Wikipedia definition. We
were pioneers of a new epidemic, sweeping
the nation: girls
with hollow cheek bones, posting pictures of our
ribcages, white bone pressing through skin that we
hated.
Now we need support groups for our
support group because we couldn’t hold
each other together, even though we tried, our bones
too brittle to support the weight of our
withering sisters and our rulers
shrinking with our waistlines not fast enough
for people to notice us as we
Boots
I used my black ink pen to dig
for rocks but it got jammed with dirt, clumsily
shoved in my pocket, weighing me down
along with those rocks, tripping over soft sinking mud seeping
into holes in my Chucks and onto decaying
tree bark that slipped out from underneath my rubber
sole tread like tree bark like skin.
You always told me to buy hiking boots but I
refused every time. I wore my Chucks because I loved the blisters
on my heels and the way my feet ached
when we finally reached the top of Shock Rock before
we knew they called it Shock Rock. I
swallowed sand
as I watched them pour you out
underneath a Weeping Cherry Willow while your mother wept and all I could think of was those goddamned boots that I never bought.
I threw my Chucks away the other day and wept
on my kitchen floor because I couldn’t remember how we met only
how you hated my shoes but loved the way
I set you on fire and wouldn’t you love
to see me now, the girl with the fire red hair and the tree
growing out of my back, branches creeping out
from underneath my bra straps?
Emily Kramer is an English major at Penn State Harrisburg. She is a student-bartender-waitress-writer born and raised in Harrisburg.
