In the age of Numbers your powers came to you in threes:
three times Peter denied Christ
and three meals a day.
You didn’t understand them
until you stood in shadow
counting ribs in the mirror, and when
everyone said their prayers you
smiled, frost-covered earth
against the sharpness of your spine.
She who suffers of the flesh performs miracles.
Some of us decide at birth to
sleep on a bed of thorns, at first
thrashing, quickly learning stillness,
during waking hours admiring
the depth of our wounds,
how hot blood still dribbles
down our foreheads and backs
long after the gashes
should have scabbed over.
Back then you picked at your skin
but never subsisted on scabs of the
poor and pus of the diseased, like
St. Catherine of Siena, her
shriveled baby thumb in a
glass case in that
basilica where
we discussed
lunch.
Still you felt the Holy Hunger
had always been within you,
yearning to be hollower, and
once you began to feed it
chewing gum and celery and lack,
it cooed and purred,
so you nourished it with
more and more nothing.
You built it a shrine deep in the woods,
ashamed of your idol worship.
But there was no denying you liked it—
You liked how it growled, how it tied you
tight to your thorn bed and lashed you
to sleep, how in your gut it curled up
against your warmest secrets, crushing
hushed confessions into the
pounding of sneaker on pavement.
At some point the Hunger moved from
your stomach to your bloodstream
and you stopped craving chocolate
and started craving the way
footsteps echoed through caverns
carving themselves inside you.
Nothing is more sacred than the rituals of the righteous.
Every night when your headlights hit the two white crosses
where twin girls died in a drunk driving accident,
you added the calories in oatmeal, half a sandwich, and an apple.
Of course Eve had to fuck the human race by eating.
God made cities from cinder
and girls from play dough;
when no one asked to mold your
abdomen with his clammy hands
you stayed after class,
begging Him to let you
take your own supple meat
between your palms
to flatten.
Once you started to accumulate debt
you learned to live with deficit.
You claimed not to be a math person
but spoke to yourself
in Numbers, in
laps and hours converted to
fractions, using the same pencil
for geometry homework and
neat stacks of caloric karma on printer paper.
You went to bed remembering cake
and the way blonde hair would
blow against a wooden cross
and woke up cleansed, calculating a
three-digit day:
smoothie for breakfast,
salad for lunch,
and bits of the barbed crown for dinner.
You didn’t understand your control
until you woke with the metallic
taste in your mouth that you called
death and held a plank until you
couldn’t remember why people
listened to music.
Ass down and abs drawn, you
memorized mantras of Australian
fitness vloggers,
then of witches in pots and
the men in charge of feeding
the flames beneath them.
The machines in the Pilates studio
looked like the rack; you
imagined at midnight they
brought out the rope and turned the crank,
stretching the women until
ligaments snapped, arms and legs
torn sloppily from sockets.
When they refused to repent
their sweat-banded confessor chanted passages
from Make the Connection: Ten Steps
to a Better Body and a Better Life,
or whatever your mom half read
then left to fester as she made you
brownies and you
threw yourself to the floor,
foaming at the mouth,
waiting for someone to schedule
your exorcism.
Ecstasy came in the shape of dad’s face
when he saw how much lasagna
you’d scraped into the trash
and Meredith walking in on you
undressing, yelling through tears,
I don’t want you to die—
(She choked on your purified breath,
you learned when you saw her slipping
potatoes to the dog under the table.)
You laughed at them all, swaddled in your
baggy white habit. They craned their necks
and saw your sunken cheeks smirking
from a tower on a brink—
glass walls on stacked stones
liable to topple
at the brush of a bony elbow.
When they wheeled you into an
ambulance fallen leaves faded to black,
voices dissolved into Latin hymns,
and you
smiled and whispered goodbye.
A mind in a deficit
must take austerity measures.
The first major cut is the Self,
every last drop wrung out by
veiny hands over a fire.
As yours burned it barely made a sound,
dainty and disjointed and dead
as the scraps from a paper snowflake.
But the space where the Self was remained;
its ghostly outline sometimes glimpsed
in the window of someone else’s parked car
or the black surface of the reservoir at dusk,
through which you watched it slowly sink
past weeds and mercury-poisoned fish
to settle among bottle caps and mud
and suburban malaise.
Glass was bent and shattered before
it hit the ground; when you learned
the marble woman holding the mirror
wasn’t Vanity but Prudence, you
thought of pulling up your
tank top to see if the handful
of almonds had ruined you,
and of purple where it didn’t belong,
and of the concavity of skulls.
Cold under the covers you couldn’t want sex.
You jumped at the touch of the girl in the
school bathroom as her fingers caressed
the ribbon of your choir dress—
slimming black,
which, said her eyebrows,
made you look like the
line between right and wrong.
When she blurted Every time I see your
arms I want to snap them like twigs, you
almost replied Yeah, and I can’t see concrete
without feeling my brains smashed against it.
You were always a gifted liar
but in the pediatrician’s office,
you mastered the art
of Yes, I’ve been eating normally,
of Yes, let’s do another blood test for
the thyroid problem we know I don’t have.
Did you learn to fear needles or nausea or the milkshake that came after?
When you felt your blood pressure drop, you
fell to your knees waiting
for the coma that never came.
Still you held your secret close,
that you were receding
like the plant in your apartment
starved of light, its yellow leaves
reaching—
You never reached; you auto-cannibalized;
when fat reserves are gone
Hunger gnaws at muscle, legs
crumple before they come to
tops of staircases, high school
hallways fill with quicksand.
You never felt stronger
than when knees buckled
and no one caught your head
and you floated on cold tile.
For Christmas your parents bought
you a glass scale, and when you
stepped on it mom sobbed and dad
went to buy a case of the same
stuff they force feed to prisoners
on hunger strike at Gitmo.
You made your list for next year:
new running shoes and books
about women who drown.
When you finally became the deficit this is what you saw:
a track, but everything was the smooth white of porcelain plates,
and instead of running you were flying or falling, and instead of
a finish line there was a beautiful saccharine sea.
So now, when He says you disgust Him
because your pretty blue eyes are windows
to your vacuousness, you scroll
through photos from back then, looking
for the one where you stand in the desert
in green shorts, where the abyss between your
thighs reminds you of the distance
you would fall from the Williamsburg Bridge
to the East River if you jumped at sunset,
which you won’t, not now anyway.
Sweating under sheets
you try to envy the queen in the
castle in some European city where it
snowed and you felt alone,
but when you think of her sipping broth
and waiting,
blindfolded, for the executioner’s
axe against her tiny white neck,
you end the dream, bored.
You would rather see Joan of Arc
smoldering at the stake,
secret ecstasy still
buried in the folds
of her flesh.
You schedule your own exorcism, then show up late;
the priest has already packed his things and locked the church.
You stand pounding at the door, cold penetrating your bones,
exhaling softly, careful not to extinguish Holy Hunger’s last embers.
At home, warm in your bed, you drift to sleep
dreaming of breakfast.