when did bones become beauty’s bar?
A repost for today. I was briefly "skinny" in graduate school because I kept running out of food money and was too ashamed to ask for help. This is a poem, a little edited, from that time.
when did bones become beauty’s bar? skeleton lauded above its flesh cheekbones sharp as sanded cliffs jawbone sure and shaped in steel hollow bones of worship hands wrist-bones angled over tea (dainty ankle-bone revered in olden proper days) china bones and saucer disks dark bones raised from under rock victor of the body’s life (in sacrifice reduced to ash) shadows lengthen long and deep beneath the bones of my own face delicate as birds in rain lifting crumbs from an empty plate
“delicate as birds in rain/lifting crumbs from an empty plate.” So lovely. I, too, had those days of thinning through poverty, and the admiration of my skinny body. The hunger was real. Thank you for sharing this.
Going from memory, I believe I like this the most of the poems I have read of yours. It is sipped from the gruel of daily existence, a taste I have tasted. When I graduated from high school was over six feet tall yet weighed 127 pounds. Much more mass now.