Issue 5, April 2010
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Elana Bell
When I skip a meal, and let the hollow
settle in like an old dog,
I know I could become one of those girls
with stick hair and hip bones sharp as stone,
who laugh with more parts air than sound.
Refuse the egg-glazed braided bread,
the shining chicken slipping off the bone,
all the extra fat that makes me Jew
would be shaved away. Grandma’s
heavy roast, stuffed into the buried hole
no one at the table sees, replaced
with air, air: a nest of swallowed air.
What else can I deny?
Lipstick, toothbrush, hair undone, the fuck—
I’m done with the animal part.
What ties me to the pig grunt, blood
stink of it: this meat, these teeth, this open
blackened mouth—Eat! Eat! Eat!—
The flood and waste of it—
Chew the salty river from the bone!
Someone is singing. A heavy rain.
From the churned up soil, something—
a stalk? a bud?—grows. Something
lifts its head from the airy nest and tries—
Elana Bell
When I skip a meal, and let the hollow
settle in like an old dog,
I know I could become one of those girls
with stick hair and hip bones sharp as stone,
who laugh with more parts air than sound.
Refuse the egg-glazed braided bread,
the shining chicken slipping off the bone,
all the extra fat that makes me Jew
would be shaved away. Grandma’s
heavy roast, stuffed into the buried hole
no one at the table sees, replaced
with air, air: a nest of swallowed air.
What else can I deny?
Lipstick, toothbrush, hair undone, the fuck—
I’m done with the animal part.
What ties me to the pig grunt, blood
stink of it: this meat, these teeth, this open
blackened mouth—Eat! Eat! Eat!—
The flood and waste of it—
Chew the salty river from the bone!
Someone is singing. A heavy rain.
From the churned up soil, something—
a stalk? a bud?—grows. Something
lifts its head from the airy nest and tries—
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