I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.

1.I am sea-side town who still sees stained wood on the sides of the store-fronts from the last tsunami– with the broken pier that everyone remembers. With the missing Ferris wheel. I don’t eat funnel cake– I taste it with my nostrils and the slick oil of dough tendrils on my fingers. I’m force-fed and I replace one form of confinement with another. I loved my anorexia so much I turned it into a boy.

I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.

2. I am the sand castle whose form is a flat memory of aspiring architects who have to rebuild after the high tides– my turrets turned to toadstools and the pink sea shell somewhere in the surf. A boy in blue-red swim trunks stomped the southernmost wall in the spirit of the conquistador blood in his ankles. Anorexia liked to sculpt my like a sudden wave and he liked to mold me like a sand dune. He told me what to wear so I knew there was nothing beautiful about a skeleton-girl in jeans– told me my shorts were too long. Said that he wanted to tear open the wrapping paper of pink frilly lingerie on the body frame of fourteen year old girl who was a coat wrack.

3. He was the boy in the blue-red swim trunks. He broke in the walls of my sedimentary fortress. He told me I like to be thinned out– that that’s what we all wanted. Told me that wrists were made for squirming and that if I didn’t cry that something in this transaction had gone wrong. He forgot to kiss me and when he did he consumed me like all the food I had ever neglected to eat out of fear. Anorexia never covered my lips with salty hands– I’ve spent the last six years writing my rapist in the corners of poetry and I don’t want to write about it anymore but he always comes back. I never told my mother and I still remember how my friend in high school said that regret wasn’t rape honey– Hands on wrists still make me flinch. I still move my head sometimes and think of how he pulled my hair like a riptide– like a sand dune– like tsunami– like the stained lines on the store fronts. I can rebuild but only in new design– I’ll find an new spiral pink shell for my castle. I took anorexia back because hunger tastes better than pressure on shoulders. I’d rather eat nightlights and hang my hands from the coat wrack.

I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.