Robin Messing
STARVING HAIBUN
I starve myself by yearning
for intimacy that doesn’t
& won’t exist.
Eduardo C. Corral
I was always a mouthful away from unbecoming
torrin a. greathouse
*
I travel to France while I’m starving, yet I don’t know I’m starving, not even when a young man at a youth hostel says to my French friend, Elle mange comme un oiseau. She eats like a bird. I sleep with him in a room where nobody will ever know me.
I slip through cracks in space & time, pelvic bones arrows, belly a receding tide that cannot be caught. I fight absence with absence. But what mystery has tried to kill me?
As if I am a young girl again, bleeding ends. As if I am an engine, a doc jumpstarts the pistons with pills. But blood will not come; a body refuses order when the mind insists. When only you will die for you, starvation is a requirement. I don’t know any of this.
*
Starving smothers a mother’s pungent perfume, the echo of her always-aching body, the groans from her mutinous gut. Each week, her married lover gifts me small stuffed animals. One morning, he sits on the bed my mother & I inhabit nightly, one half where my father once slept, a thin seam between us. Still in my pajamas, her lover talks to me a little like a father about benign things I’ll never remember & later she says, Don’t ever let him do that again.
*
My mother kicks me out of the flat each time the lover shows for sex. I shake my way to the library, books to warm a frosty childhood room. Faint in a fluorescent stairwell, my sight is scarred, feet anemic.
If starvation is a feeling of falling forever, the mind must break the fall.
Dizzy in a bodega, the owner sits me on a crate, unseals a bottle he waves at my face, tries to revive me with ammonia’s bitter whiff.
Once at work, my eyelids flutter & they call EMS. In the ambulance, the young EMT sits beside me. I’m starving! shrieks the siren, in a language no one understands. At the hospital, the doc fills me with fluids, rain to treat indifference. If anyone asks why I’m starving I will say, I am no one.
Sensing I want him to stay, the EMT lingers before vanishing. Is this the only way I can love & redeem my mother, by living in this body in pain?
Endlessly pulled back to a beginning, I keep refusing to look.
*
I pick up men—in a bar, on the street, at a summer camp, at a dance performance or a writer’s festival. Some of them have other women. Or men. They pull down my pants the way a man once yanked me beneath the sea when I tried to save him from drowning. I’m a shiny object and a good thief, their lust my secret meals. When they’re inside me the raging father is silent, his privacy my pleasure, each repeated entrance brightening a deadened room.
*
I feed on sweets--bananas, cookies, muffins. Bites of each, never one whole thing, never devouring. At last, I’m brought to a brink. My sight goes white while on a trip to the West Indies where men touch me on the street & ask if I’m free. Starving says, One step before enlightenment. Starving says, You cannot remember? I am an unshakeable memory.
*
A doc feeds me sugar, the remedy in a poison—the doc’s desk and chair, a seat holding me, ground for my feet. You must eat, he says. I want you to eat, he says. Is this what love looks like?
*
I eat & I eat,
yet starvation keeps its grip,
a star, a witness.
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