While her friends engage in the privileges
Of being young, robust and kissed with the whimsy of innocence,
Martha stuffs Oreos into her mouth,
Gulps them down with a litre of milk,
Then heads for three gigantic bags of potato chips.

Ripping one bag open,
The morsels cannot be devoured quickly enough.
Gagging, swallowing more and more milk,
Martha rushes finally to her porcelain prince,
And offers him everything that churns inside of her.

Her shining, white prince will never betray her wraithlike body.
For as long as she stuffs food wildly and continually into her mouth,
He will not curse her with the scourge of obesity.

One afternoon the porcelain prince grew angry.
He expected his rudamentary offerings,
The cookies, the chips, ice cream, cereal and yogurt,
That were his by rite for keeping Martha thin.

Bit Martha could not purge her copious feast this time.
It somehow got stuck in the back of her throat.
Waves of panic clutched at her fraying nerve ends,
So she sucked down Epicac, drained the bottle completely.
It worked and thus continued thinness was her coveted reward.

"I can't keep living like this!" She cried one day.
"I hate my prince! But I love my slenderness.
What if i didn't eat at all?
Life, as I know it, would be far less complicated".

Was it food she craved so desperately?
Or the love of her prince's gift of thinness?
One day, as her friends laughed uproariously
At the antics in the latest Jim Carrey film,
Martha gave her porcelain prince an unexpected bonus.

Along with enough undigested food to fill a mid-size Frigidaire,
She offered him her blood, many many cupfuls of it,
As it poured from her body into her sainted object of worship.
The poor girl died before ever getting what she really wanted,
Lying splayed like a ratty throw-rug on the cold barren floor.

So what did Martha want so badly that she was willing to die?
It wasn't the thin body with which her prince divined her.
It wasn't a giant box of Oreos.
But it most definitely would have assured her, skinniness be damned,
A much longer and happier, self-loving life.

Jane Wanklin
1997.