Two Poems by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Your Hands

When you play music for me, I watch
the nimble joints of your practiced fingers
curl over the faded piano keys
like diaphanous wings unfolding in the heat of sunrise
and I feel something I did not feel before.

You play a chord and I see
a web developer, fabricating a brand-new reality
from a Lego pile of ones and zeroes; and
a surgeon, hands holding mastery
over the cellular processes of life itself; and
God, mixing the soundtrack of the cosmos
like a DJ high on bass and MDMA.

When you play music for me, your wrists
dance like Baryshnikov between sharps and flats and perfect fifths,
percussion as choreography as language as song,
and as your entire body resonates with music you yourself have scripted
I remember what it was like to fall in love with you.

You write me a song and I reflect
on tempo and poetry and heartbeat and joy, the privilege of immortality
captured in something beautiful and heretofore unknown –
art that exists where art previously did not exist,
a Big Bang birthing matter from the seeds of nothing at all –
and everything because I was lucky enough to meet a musician and my soulmate
one summer night at a bar.

When you play music for me, I forget all about how
I used to yearn for the touch of tragic artists
who sow the sort of lust and mystery
I would later reap as heartbreak
and instead picture the silk of your palms against the landscape of my naked back
as you soothe my restless body when I am unable to sleep.

You compose and I watch your fingertips
sculpting notes into paths and layers and staircases and peaks,
thousands of hours of work culminating in this very moment and,
in an act of primal validation orchestrated by Darwin himself,
a rush of neurotransmitters through my blood affirms my choice
that this is indeed the mate to father my young.

When you play music for me, I cannot look away
from your hands.

*

She Gave Me Her Last Diet Coke

I blame my mother, of course,
for conceiving
and birthing
my own addiction to Diet Coke.

They say eating disorders are a family disease;
they say an eating disorder is like a gun.
The pistol is the genetic predisposition
to seek out control when things feel uncontrollable;
the bullet is a culture that venerates thin
and praises the anesthetic of becoming less.
The trigger is unbearable anxiety or distress,
so is it any wonder that childhood trauma leads to eating disorders?

Screwed by both nature and nurture,
my mother’s eating disorder was planted in my genome
before I even had a say.
Ballet and abuse and mental illness and assault
germinated my Anorexia by the time I was eight.
And the rest of my life has been spent
grappling with the one firearm
I never wanted to fire.

They say recovery from an eating disorder can take over a decade;
they say maybe it isn’t even possible to recover at all.
After three decades of punishing myself
for requiring the fuel of food
I still don’t know if I will ever be free
from the voices that inform me I am worthless
deep within the bowels of my broken brain.
For years I have worked, and cried,
and done my best to get where I am today.
But my Diet Coke addiction remains a vestigial artifact
of the times it would take two twenty-ounce bottles
just to quench my hunger.

I eventually forgave my mother
for loading the gun that became my cross to bear;
after a lifetime of estrangement,
she was finally my friend
by the time she passed last November.
And I know she loved me
because the last time I saw her before she died
she gave me her last Diet Coke.

*

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Only as Sick as Your Secrets: Notes from Residential Eating Disorder Treatment,” a forthcoming memoir with Watertower Hill Press, “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novelette with Emerge Literary Press, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a collection of short fiction from Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks