Better Than Starbucks!

June

This month when I came home, my mother’s bones looked

like they had been sharpened into points.

This is the same month she told me that I’m killing myself with food,

and she cried and held onto all eighty-six pounds of herself while she spoke,

swallowed words, spoke again.

She looked at my frame like something untouchable.

This month I lost twelve pounds, counted every calorie,

googled the caloric value of one Frito and decided against.

The day I left for my final semester away, my mother cried in fear

that I would refuse to take care of myself. As I packed my bag

she gave me reminders in a language that was supposed to mean,

I love you, please be safe, but said

​

A granola bar is as bad for you as a cookie

And a cookie a day is twelve pounds in a year

Two cups of cookie dough ice cream is six hundred calories

A single bagel is equal to six pieces of wheat bread

No one needs cream in their coffee

No one needs to eat like that.

I love my mother in the same way I eat.

I consume every word she says to me. I roll my eyes,

but in the coming days I feel it seep into my blood, 

slide down to nest in my stomach.

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

I am becoming her like I decide where every calorie

I eat has found rest in my body and feel it become me.

I drink every tear my mother cries each time I leave her pristine home

for my dusty apartment filled with fruit flies and granola bar wrappers,

and frozen meals, and cinnamon rolls.

This month, my mother told me to do it––

lose weight, that unspeakable saturated thing––for me,

not for anyone else, and I told her I never felt my own weight so much

until this month, when I swallowed every word she spoke to me whole.

Claire Grace