Anorexic

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
ber curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,

I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.

Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
By Evan Boland

The girl he is talking about symbolizes anorexia, and the side effects and
feelings of the disease. He uses the metaphor My body is a witch to compare
the thoughts of her body to a mythical creature to show that people think their
body is evil and deserves to be punished. The guy they refer to symbolizes the
normal ways of eating and normal life. An anorexic person fears being outside of
the comfort zone they built for themselves. This poem is full of hyperboles to
show to the extent of how awful and disgusting this disease can be to a persons
mind and body. Lia connects to the feelings portrayed in this poem from page 161
in wintergirls. She is explaining how it feels to be in the thought process of
someone who is anorexia or has an eating disorder. She uses many hyperboles to
describe the feelings of how bad anorexia is.
He Wishes His Beloved Was Dead
Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.
By W.B Yeats

A lot of times we realize what we want to say after its too late, we miss our
opportunities to tell people what they mean to us. The author is telling us what
they would do if the person they loved were still alive. In the story wintergirls, Lia
loses her ex best friend Cassie and finds it hard to admit that it was depressing for
her. She always is wishing for her forgiveness for not helping her, even though she
is dead. The author uses a lot of foreshadowing but instead of telling about the
future he uses it to show what wouldve happened under different circumstances.
The book also talks about suicide and wanting to die. Cassie had too much alcohol
and forced herself to vomit so much that her esophagus ruptured. Death is the
only thing that can truly separate us from our loved ones.