ANOREXIC – Poem by Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland is an Irish poet and feminist. She was born in Dublin and was educated in London and New York. Her first book (In Her Own Image), established her reputation as a writer (on specifically feminist themes and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world). She is professor of English at Stanford University and is married with two daughters, has taught at a number of universities. Her books of poetry include Domestic Violence, Against Love Poetry, The Lost Land, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, In a Time of Violence, The Journey and Other Poems, and In Her Own Image. In addition to her books of poetry, Boland is also the author of Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. https://www.amazon.com/Eavan-Boland/e/B000APQSN8

ANOREXIC – Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching ber 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.