Lynn Finger

Content Warning: Images of being underweight

The Year I Stopped Eating

rises in me and takes me through

a time of tough scavenging.

I fast. I ride the air.

Starve out the rage of it,

the impossible stretched thin of it,

a lit match, a moment when nothing burned

and then it all did,

fattened to

             a wave in a hungry sky.

I was slim, like a slender elm in a bureaucrat’s forest

ready for harvest,

stomach as flat as a French model’s,

             ready for adulation,

a size zero like a precious actress.

I was a banquet,

a bounty, the jutted ribs a toy &

collar bone a yoke, Picasso cheek bones

angular, the best disappearance I knew.

             They tell you,

you just can’t leave like that,

but you can, if you’re not afraid to seek

            secrets of a dead ocean,

and not afraid to be ravenous,

                                    like sea grass without a sea.

Originally published in Night Music Journal,

I carry my body, a tornado

I'm the greedy torch who carries you, my body.
I twist you, ribs & spine & scapula, shins & breasts,
over grassy flail. Your mink nipples & velvet belly
slick, your flagrant inventory of self. I carry you
through naked sky, light nickels & your hair melts
cake over my ragged arms. When you sink, I counterweight
you, I pull you not afraid into the hail, your naked-
ness storms—the narwhals & fingernails & chin & slide
deliciously in my gust. I carry you, my body ripe & felting.
There is no way in hell we didn’t scathe a path of sharp lights
scraped across the sky.

The Parrots

Uncle, a rare meningioma chewed your spine, a vicious chance,
& burned you, a high school star athlete to wheelchair. Paraplegia.
I (your youngest niece) didn’t know how to talk about it.

What words arced my lips? I’m afraid you might die. I’m afraid to talk about your
wheelchair, which is another you. It’s a lie to say, I have hope.  Wheels
on either side of you, a metal chariot, took my speech.

It carried your illness. Thing is, you defined wheelchair panache.
You beat the TABs (the temporarily able bodied as you called
everyone else) at billiards, snaking your sleek contraption 

around the table like it was a trendy add-on, while the standing stumbled
with their sticky feet & awkward drinks in one hand. I visited you
in your two-bedroom place with the flattened carpet

& hospital bed, Amazon parrots squawking in converted window cages.
The great parrots, with wrenching beaks that could tear wood,
fluttered green, red, raucous. They spoke for me in endless

overlapping chatter & grey tongues, screamed my pain. I saw you weren’t
the caged one. Your lopsided smile, pulled up at the corner, could
not be bolted down or metalled. The wheelchair that was

you but not, you rode like you designed it just for kicks & built the damn
thing yourself. It was me in the cage, my fear for you, my fear of
what was happening or might happen, & I was grateful

 for the yelling of parrots, as they culled the chaos inside me, they were
my wheelchair, you could say, so I could find my way to move
forward, just as you had yours.

Originally published in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art

I want my body to be pixels of galaxy

I want feathers for cells.
I want my body to inhabit itself
as unfettered.

But my body is a skin press,
a suitcase of static filaments
from hair to hips.

My body protects itself,
overlaid flesh carabiners
hook & catch, edges roll & stay.

I want to split this tight flesh corset
one seam at a time.
Peel it outward, red muscled
and intestined, once destined
to be held in.

My body is a mollusk
afraid to fissure
its shell, to let its restraints

fall. I want to float the squid interior,
remove its equations
of containment, let my body be wild

like a surge of starlings, arrowed, spiraled.
Let my body be
a magnet of a million parts,

whorled,
& not obliged
to any.