I learned to love hunger and “no, thank you,”

To love longing, dismissal, and doubt

More than hands held across busy streets,

More than warm beds, soft hands, or fresh croissants.

An empty gnaw behind my too-soft ribs

Feels safer than that plate of hash browns

And the casual indifference of one man

More familiar than the love of another.

I push away ample plates and affection with the same hands

Telling myself that it’s better to be hungry, to be wanting,

Than to be full, sated, or complete,

And forgetting who or what convinced me so in the first place.

The weight of my own mother’s self deprecation seeps between

The folds of my stomach and the space where my thighs rub

Because I accidentally watched her hate her body and deny herself

Compliments, fresh croissants, new clothes, and praise.

If the most perfect woman to walk the planet folds herself

Into dim alcoves and frowns in every mirror,

Absently disparaging the well from which I was drawn,

How can I indulge in something as unthinkably forbidden

As comfort in or–God forbid–celebration of

this body made of rounded edges and sourdough bread?

If I’ve survived this long starving for softer hands on my skin

but kept alive through scant offerings of sex and isolated flowers,

How dare I glut my base, primal hunger

For a shared bed, for lips pressed against my temples,

For blissfully unconscious nights, and for slow breathing mornings

Warm at the side of another?

So starve, they say, in beauty’s name; suffer in love’s:

It’s supposed to hurt in the name of something greater.

Strange, I find myself thinking,

That what was meant for joy somehow wrought ruin.

I’ve taken the simple and good, and with Midas’ hands,

Sharpened it into a weapon against myself,

Shaving the skin from my body in martyrdom

And paring affection from my hands in sterilization,

forgetting that no one asked me to.