these are not monsters. there are no monsters here. these feel like love,
and when they creep inside you it’s like something once missing is finally coming home.
how could a monster make such pretty girls?
pretty girls, pretty skinny girls,
they look like everything that is wonderful about being alive, like vodka diet cokes and pictures of hip bones at the beach
and all i’ve eaten for the past three days are my own fingernails
and these monsters (not monsters) can make you pretty too
you’ll learn to make jokes about why you’re slicing the five strawberries you bought for lunch (and breakfast, and dinner)
into twenty-five pieces.
lifting morsels from the perfectly folded napkin with delicate crackling fingers to hesitant tongue
and when the jokes get too cumbersome and taste too much like nourishment, like letting go, like happiness,
learn to put an end to lunch, forget what it means and by the end of your last year in high school you’ll know every spot in the building
where no one will ask where you friends are and why you look so tired.
these monsters (not monsters) will share their secrets. you’ll learn that needle thin bones, when crushed into a fine paste
and stirred into the twenty glasses of water you were going to drink today
taste like lemonade
and you can have a sip for only the cost of the rest of your life spent worshipping the feeling of being hollow, searching up number and number
you, too, can spend the rest of the day smelling of what you just had to scrub off the bathroom floor
go, they’ll say, outstretching manicured hands, bottle cap wrists— memorize menus and the lies you could tell
spend hours at the grocery store counting
fifty
one hundred
two hundred
no more than three
or else suddenly your thighs begin to inflate like the balloons from all the birthday parties you couldn’t go to
you will learn to avoid celebration because celebration means food
you will spend christmas day fantasizing about burying your dissolving teeth into your knuckles until your heart stops.
the not-monsters will feed you your first cigarette and your second, and your tenth.
they will leave your once shiny hair in a clump on your pillowcase, just for you.
and when your body gets too weak, it starts to crumble, but where skin breaks skin sunflowers will grow.
an entire garden will force itself from your empty stomach billowing our your mouth and you’ll choke but you’ll be happy
because at least you’re not eating
you’ll decompose
until you cannot be differentiated from all the skeletons that have been living in your closet
don’t you wish you could shrink? don’t you wish you could have that control?
don’t you wish you could make your mom cry because she just doesn’t get why you’d do this
you’re smart but you just googled how many calories are in tooth paste
the pretty girls
pretty skinny girls
pretty dying girls
pretty dead girls
the parasite can be restrained but not destroyed. but no matter. it’s a beautiful thing to be made of porcelain.
the picture of your hip bones at the beach was worth it.
— Savannah Brown “Skinny Girls Bleed Flowers”