Black girls don’t get eating disorders -
And yet we do,
You may not see it but we do,
We live it, we breathe it - we are it
You say ‘a black girl can’t struggle’
I say ‘unlike you eating disorders don’t discriminate’
Our bodies are scrutinised - so what did you expect,
When you made a comment, and i followed through -
With results that you ignore,
Results that you score,
Results you caused - from your poor choice of words
Black girls struggle too,
Our bodies are the proof -
The truth,
That you deny,
But the numbers don’t lie,
And our bodies still cry -
For help,
Help that we don’t receive -
Because the world can’t believe,
That black girls get eating disorders too,
And how do i know this - it’s because i am living proof -
That black girls get eating disorders too
The glass has teeth—
it bites at dawn,
gnawing away what flesh I thought was mine.
A rib is a rung to heaven,
but the ladder never ends.
Numbers bloom red on the bathroom scale,
they hum like insects in the skull.
I am a mannequin—
wire shoulders, hollow eyes,
a smile stitched with needles.
Children bruise themselves
against invisible rulers.
They carve equations into skin:
less, less, less.
The mirror spits back a stranger,
a body mangled into myth,
a coffin that walks,
polished with hunger.
Depression wears a crown of glass,
stress rattles its beads of bone.
We hate the face we are given,
we hate the face we invent.
The mirror waits, patient as winter,
to swallow us whole.
The girl thought she had it beat,
But then she couldn’t stand to eat,
Not even a single piece of meat.
The girl started to disappear,
She begged for help but no one could hear.
She didn’t want to be here,
All she was, was a peer.
The girl was so obsessed with her weight,
She began monitoring what she ate.
Soon she began to lose pounds date by date.
When she looked into mirrors, all she felt was hate.
The girl slowly became bones,
People around her would say it was for attention or it was just hormones.
The girl just put in her headphones
And drowned out the world’s groans.
How slippery the slope is
That you just climbed up.
6/13/2018
Kale Brereton
The beauty of you
Ups and downs in life
This beautiful journey
If life was just good days
It’d be flat just like the Prairies
But its not
And neither are you
As much as we are the same
We are different too
Our beauty lies within
Sometimes it is in a dark place
Sometimes it is hidden
This beauty of yours
Is not just your reflection
This beauty is in your mind and heart
True beauty is inside you
Locked away like precious art
Please see the signs
Please find the clues
The true beauty of today
The true beauty of you
Is who you are deep down
And all that you have been through
Kale Brereton
5/1/2018
https://www.thefreethinkinghuman.com/
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