pg. 11

i lie in my bed in the tower room, my cigarette becoming ash. the moon looks too big, swollen like a belly full of blood. my period doesn't come and the moon swells more each month. i touch myself furiously trying to set the blood free. i'm not pregnant; the doctor says it's because i don't eat. my bones feel starved, chalky. the moon, resentful that she can't make me bleed, pulls and pulls on my belly and my swollen heart, saying, if you don't bleed i'll drag at your very bones.

 

pg.14

i will be thin and pure like a glass cup. empty. pure as light. music. i move my hands over my body- my shoulders, collar bone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. in the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. my hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. i could be a loy younger than seventeen. i could be a child still, untouched.

 

pg. 73

i had to walk into the dark, into a dark darker than any i had ever been in. so dark that it was like the dark i imagine inside my body, as if there were no difference between the dark inside of me and the dark outside, as if i had stopped existing. it was a dark that twisted and turned, clanked and rattled and smashed around us. i felt hands touching me in the impossible dark.

 

pg. 96

my eyes choke on the darkness and my stomach is like a live thing- a separate creature that i have imprisoned, that is under my power. it is a little painted deman howling inside me. i imagine that the reason i don't bleed anymore each month is because this deman, this lie-baby, is sucking up all the blood to feed itself, to keep itself alive. i hear horror stories about girls who don't eat- how their hair turns white and their gums bleed. but i feel beautiful-perfect. i am all pale bone and bone-pale flesh and pale hair and i am light. i am like some fairy thing. i dream about fairies dancing around the house with their rib cages showing like baskets under their flesh.

 

pg. 96

I could drift up and away from here. i am so light. bound by nothing. not even time. and i am pure now.

 

pg. 137

i want to paint. i want to paint things that will make people feel their pulse. like drums. like running. like making love.