Tag: the body

Feeding the Body by Cam McGlynn

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Feeding the Body

When I can’t gain weight, the doctors reassure me that the baby
will take what she needs from me. Will suck the very calcium out

of my bones, if necessary. She won’t starve.
They let my question float, unanswered, in the air:

But what about me? I didn’t know, then, that mothers
weren’t supposed to worry about themselves.

I put myself on a secret anti-diet, reversing every rule I’d read
as a teen in Cosmo magazines: Always eat dessert first.

Drink only empty calories, not water. Never mistake hunger
for thirst. I have no cravings, only aversions. I eat

rice and beans for two weeks straight when my body
rejects every other food. I tell my doctors about my dizzy spells,

the cold sweats and quickening heart, even at rest.
The air I can’t drag down to my lungs fast enough

for their hungry whine and whistle. “Odd,” they say. “Your baby’s
heart sounds fine”, they say. “See you in a month,” they say.

Frankenstein’s monster, eight-feet tall, whose viscera and bones
were gathered from the slaughter and charnel houses,

lived on nothing but nuts and berries. Did his body, too,
always hunger? My stomach should distend like a blood-sated tick,

but my baby curls inward, instead of pushing out. She rearranges
my organs as she grows hers, shoving my stomach up under

my ribs, with no room to expand. The first thing I do
before getting out of bed is eat. The last thing I do

before going to sleep is eat. I eat every two hours when I’m awake.
I’m so tired of eating. At my eight-month appointment, I step onto the scale.

The nurse and doctor both sigh. “You finally
gained a little weight,” they say. “We were so worried about you.”

*

Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher from Frederick, Maryland. Ever since she was trapped in a deflating moonbounce as a child, she’s been deeply suspicious of street fairs. Her work has appeared in Whale Road Review, Rattle, The Shore, and ONE ART, among others.

My grandmother asks what size my dress is by Lucy De Maio

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My grandmother asks what size my dress is

I want to tell her, infinity. The biggest number.
The sum of every meal I’ve missed. The total count
of every bone in my body that weakened when starved,
thinning into things just as destructive as they were
destroyed. A value greater than every time she’s asked.
An irrational number, one that spirals like we both do,
one that oscillates to the point of collapse. The kind of
number that you don’t even know how to read aloud.
A number so towering and imaginary you can feel it
encroaching on your space, your brain, that little corner
that does the calculating, the panicking, tracks the hours
wasted wondering if the limit exists, if one can approach zero.
A number no one will discover. The result of adding the tags
of every dress I’ve ever bought, every unflattering waist
I’ve regretted. The sum of every sliver of shallow hope
born from flat morning stomachs. The product given by
multiplying instability with ignorance, the kind that
unconditional love can never excuse. The quantity
measured when you stack up every minute we two have
drained thinking about our bodies instead of living in them.
The number you get when you trace the family tree,
adding up every woman sucking in her abdomen in the
photo, hoping the universe will swallow it, hoping her
daughter granddaughter great granddaughter won’t have to
twist in her torso too— not hoping that she won’t.

*

Lucy De Maio is Chicago Youth Poet Laureate 2026. She loves poetry that reclaims heritage, art that explores what it means to live in a body, and anything about trains.

The Body by Dana Henry Martin

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The Body

Red the blood, blue the blood,
on entry, on exit, like a color song.

Pools of red turning maroon,
turning carmine.

The room is piss yellow,
the nurses green as shoots,

vertical, a moving jungle.
They want what they can’t have:

my death. I want what I can’t have:
my life. We are all swimming

in this lavender water, this gray air.
I ask for oxygen and get sulfur.

I ask for silence and get tinnitus.
My cells explode into calligraphy

that’s dripping. It’s a language
my paginated body cannot hold.

::

I see your body unraveling
in the hall. I almost said

unravening, unleavening,
unleveling. All true. I know

because I’m you. Pretty flower.
Pretty nude. Who taught you

to petal? To move toward
any open door? They’re already

calling you a whore. Broken stem.
Busted seed. Gown down

around your waist. That
everywhere hair. There’s

nothing beyond the frame.
Those stairs lead nowhere.

Leaves like hands.
Carpet like a tongue.

You are so young, Child.
You are already flung.

::

She and her maid
were transformed,

all brutality and body,
brought as close to God

as any man. Not a drop
of blood on their dresses,

not an inch of space
between their intentions.

Knife like a cross but
him like something else.

He begged them to stop.
As if. Gentileschi put them

in the good light, oiled
Holofernes’s blood

until it shone. Painted
the knife more than halfway

through the neck,
Judith’s hand knuckling

his head in place as she
cut clean through skin,

then muscle, then vein,
then nerve, then cartilage

and back in the opposite
order. After she split

the Adam’s apple,
she sliced the carotid

in two like a worm.
Gentileschi showed

Judith’s cleavage,
flush cheeks, rippled

sleeves, dark ribbons,
well-muscled arms,

her fingers, her wanting.
Gentileschi showed it all:

how it was, how it had to be.
How it will be forever.

—

These are sections from a long poem titled “The Body.” Each of these sections is ekphrastic. The first is after Joan Mitchell’s Faded Air 1, the second after Dorothea Tanning’s Sunflower in the Hall, and the third after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. Allison Blevins provided the artwork as inspiration for these poems in her workshop titled “Writing with Pain: A Generative Workshop on Illness and Disability.”

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).

Weights & Measures by Francesca Leader

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Weights & Measures

I still don’t know how
You can compliment a girl
Without infecting her,

Say she’s perfect
Without seeding worry
Of when she won’t be

Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness

Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something

Else, submit to
Subsumption. I still don’t
Know how you can

Expect a girl’s soul
Not to snag on BMI charts,
Measurements, bodyfat

Ratios, celebrity weight
Loss and “Half My Size” stories,
Because they’re

Everywhere—number-shaped
Briars ensnarling all
Paths to self-acceptance—

Or tell her to inure,
Ignore, be tough but soft,
A paradox, like vanity sizing

That makes her crave
The labels that anoint her
A 2 and damn the brands

That brand her a 12,
As if she could be “S”
And “L” at once,

Survive the truth
Of weighing & measuring how
Much she matters in inverse

Proportion to how much
(Always too much) matter
She comprises, for bodies

Most loved are the
Bodies that least exist.
I still don’t know how

You can call a girl
Beautiful because she’s thin
Or ugly because she isn’t

Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible

Instead of what is whole.

*

Francesca Leader has poetry published or forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, HAD, Broadkill Review, Stone Circle, The Storms Journal, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.