Body Image Therapy Center: Day 8
“You know, I’ve been doing this a long time.” Me too. “Funny, Joey…listen: almost always, the root of these things is found in the relationship with the mother.” The mother. “Sure, try to imagine your mother.” Imagine my mother? “Even when we think we have good relationships with our parents, we learn in recovery it’s often more complicated than that.” So you’ve had an eating disorder too, then. “We’re not here to talk about me.” We’re here to talk about me. “Yes.” And my eating disorder. “Right.” You have no idea what we’re going through here. “Why not?” Because you don’t. “What if I told you my sister died of complications surrounding anorexia?” Did she? “What if she did—would you trust me to understand?” So my brother should be a therapist. “That’s not the point.” You switched bodies with your sister before she died. “Of course not.” So I don’t get how you think you can help me. “Let me try.” Try. “What’s your family life like?” Great—I’ve just found out my brother’s an expert on bulimia. “Joey, if you’re not going to take this seriously, I can’t help you.” My brother doesn’t have a job. If you need help, he could start on Monday—we could use the money. “Fine, Joey, fine. And your mother, what about your mother?”
Still Life With Wreckage: Before and After
the spider alive
still watches from the ceiling
clots of blood on the floor rocks
overturned on rough carpet
my bed isn’t mine it’s evidence
poisoned and useless as a girl
i understood creation as distance
from god who designed you to crave
death in your fist to recognize
which girls wouldn’t tell
no one taught me how
to live with skin that betrays
how to forgive the trembling hand
that cushioned my chin
the way it looks now in daylight
at daybreak mouth open
the poplar spits seeds
the shape of his fists
impossible delicate
i must’ve prayed wrong decades
i waited before he came
life ripped from my center then
relief arrival the innermost spiral of
a perfect breath how to know
the way my blood would move
to house him for months
gently harvesting his name
i sheltered this body
is ours now this wreckage
its mouth only opens for you
Jo Blair Cipriano (she/her) is a 2019 Brooklyn Poets Fellow whose work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Copper Nickel, diode poetry journal, Epiphany Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Brooklyn Poets Poem of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Frontier Magazine New Voices Prize. She lives in Tucson, AZ.
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