The Ultimate Weight Loss Solution

The Ultimate Weight Loss Solution

"Design your world so that you can't help but succeed." --Dr. Phil McGraw, The Ultimate Weight Loss Solution


Here it comes lurching,
in wreck and ruin--
yet another poem
featuring Woman versus Body.
We are legion,
us would-be murderers.

Maybe we're born with these urges:
comets of breath bewildered
by the sudden weight of form--
salt and heart, liver and tongue.
Perhaps we never recovered
from the shock of spines and teeth,
esophagi and ovaries;
it was all too much at once.

Perhaps it's a bloodlust
we're conditioned to:
oh the pleasure laced with shame
as we're taught to take our licks and like it:
Kiss the knife. Pare off the excess.
Curl in like an apple peel.
Now cut
every last yearning
cell from your core.
Good girl XXXXXX razor hipped.
Clavicle forward XXXX show us
your breakables.

I've got a drawer full of tricks
for banishing a body,
poisons made of chastity and charity,
vials of pestilence and virtue,
and I have drank them each,
night by empty night.
But it's been said, and I believe it,
that the body is a damn hard thing to kill.

It's been said that anorexics
only seek enlightenment. It's been said:
you can heal your life.
It's all been said--every single goddamned thing
about the whole sad story.
There's nothing left to do
but lift
vial to mouth, and drink.


--Kristen McHenry