The same year I starved myself I tried

to sleep with someone new and older

each week, and my mother told me

about citrus trees: how they can sense

when they're about to die, and begin

to flower desperately, the fruit already overripe

before it hits the ground, the inside rotten

as it bursts open—the body, when hungry,

swells, and all that year I looked so full

of a nothing that longed to be enough, standing

on a scale in someone's cramped bathroom

to find I weighed as much as I did

when I was twelve, then having no choice

but to leave the bathroom and fuck him and then

someone else and so on, the way as a child

I didn't know how to draw faces or hands

so all my people had no choice but to be born

with their heads buried in their folded arms,

the way gravity pulls a fruit to the ground and splits it open

like a sentence, as though the dying tree were trying

to leave nothing unsaid, which is why I told my mother

about that year and she answered

with a nature fact, to show me, I guess,

she and the world already knew how the story went,

looking at my body how I might have looked

at my own hunger, if it could have stood

outside of me, ashamed, and begged me

to let it back in, or maybe like she was

the thing not allowed in, my body

a burning house that, before it belonged

to a blank and inexorable fire,

had once been hers.