Parthenogenesis

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating, and sometimes easy’s the thing. To be double-me, half the trouble but not lonely. Making cakes to celebrate any old day. Eating too much: the emperor of being used. Nature, mature and feminized, naturalizes me naturally by creating the feeling of being a natural woman, like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up again. To solve that problem, there’s the crispness of not eating, a pane of glass with a bloody-edged body, that is, having the baby at the prom undetected and, in a trance of self-preservation, throwing it away in the girls’ room trash. Buried under paper towels, silent. Nothing could be better, for the teenager. For me, starving, that coreless, useful feeling, is not making myself smaller but making myself bigger, inside. It’s prince and pauper both, it’s starving artist and good model in one masterpiece. It rhymes with marveling and that’s no accident. Fullness is dullness. Dreaming’s too easy. But sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I put in just the right amount, but then I’m the worst kinds of patsy, a chump giving myself over to myself like a criminal to the law, with nothing to show for it. No reward, no news, no truth. It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day. Like some kind of employee. Being told what to do. Chop off a finger to plant in fertilizer (that is, in used animal food), to grow a finger tree. More fingers for me. Stop saying finger. I’m the one in charge here. Stop the madness and just eat the mirror. Put it in sideways or crush it into a powder. It doesn’t hurt and it works. Mouth full, don’t talk. Nothing to say. I’ll be a whole new person. I’ll make her myself. Then we’ll walk away. We’ll say to each other how she’s changed. How we wouldn’t have recognized us.