Spoken Word #1 - Rupture

Hey there and welcome to Spoken Word, where I share my poetry with you lovely folks.

Today’s poem is titled Rupture. This poem is particularly emotional for me (as you can quite literally hear my voice quaking towards the end…) because I wrote it detailing my own experiences from the perspective of a woman in an image I saw when I was at my sickest suffering from bulimia nervosa.

The woman had died naked, kneeling on the ground and slumped over the toilet. She died of gastric rupture resulting from excessive purging. Her family took the photo and shared it online to warn other young people and their loved ones of the reality of disordered eating.

That photo stuck with me despite it not being the wake-up call the young woman’s family intended it to be. One day when I was in recovery from my own eating disorder, this poem just came spilling out of me. I didn’t realize it was connected to that photo at all until I read it back to myself and connected the dots.

I naturally have a very small voice, so I’ve included the transcript of my poem below. I hope you enjoy my work <3 Thank you all so much for your support.

Love,

Alexandra

Transcript:

I am a fragile person

I spend each day wringing out my insides, emptying them out into a clogged toilet, down the shower drain, inside a plastic bag, in a garbage can, in the bathroom sink.

I grasp my shame between two cupped hands, my innocence, my mistakes, my childhood.

Purity slipping through my fingers in clots of lettuce and strands of saliva. With just a flush, my sins and intestines vanish in a single sour whirlpool.

I am in control.

And my hands, those vessels I once used to create music and pet dogs now reached into the darkest corners of my mouth, beyond my uvula which no longer gags, burning holes into my molars and shoveling their rusty iron tips down my ruptured esophagus, into the abscess where emptiness grows and everything else dies.

It is useless now.

And like a butcher, I disassemble my body, laying each slab of yellow fat gently down into bulging heaps.

My body is wasting.

It is useless now.

Blood and bile drip down my chin as I heave for hours, my chest rising and falling gently and painfully as the moon swells in the cobwebbed window above.

It is useless now.

Morning comes and my mother pounds on the door, the heavy beating of my heart filling my ears, my ribs cracking as I cough up my lungs, each finger digging deeper and deeper, scooping out my insides, scrubbing hard with soap and gargling with bleach until I am only a delicate pink shell.

My head hurts.

It is useless now.

My arm dangles from the toilet bowl. The empty balloon of my body has deflated. My head is resting on the bathroom garbage can, the contents of my stomach overflowing, pooling around my legs, coating the floor in a bitter, bloody pig slop.

My fingers graze the acid that rests in a film over the toilet water.

The pounding ceases.

The floor is cold and my lips are blue.

Numb.

It is useless now.

I am asleep.