Star On the Brink

The anorexia is not conspicuous, being half-submerged, just breaking through. She’s a powdered mirage. Her skin a hyaline shear drawn over a necklace of clavicle bones. She knows her chest is returning to childhood, she wants to shelter there, to be her own child. Small breasts bob under burgundy nipples, buds made more prominent, anchored as they are to shipwrecked ribs. Designer bling distracts. Cameras whir, she poses, one hand on a denuded hip, not resting there, but stealthily carrying an ounce of flesh, toward a spotlight. We collude with her, applaud the way she decorates a condition. We all know her emaciated beauty is a mutual hoodwink. We know that the closer to death sexuality becomes, the more rapacious our appetite, the more we will wail, as she slips through our hungry hands.