YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

to be born
and - in after-birth -
slaughtered by that rabbit-killing man, my creator,
who wished for my non-existence or at least
a son.
to learn to be too large
to fit into words
so, trying to fit into numbers,
a very easy death for the soul,
because no one will solve the equation pf that quiet and secret
vanishment
until the devouring has almost been completed.
to have to find a way to come to terms with the
body-ness.
to starve the starvation,
turn the killer into a corpse,
then, at last to choke down the ashes.
from which I will rise to
eat sinewy love like air.
but the poison - oh, the poison!
gorged and dying,
contorted belly from all this swallowing,
falling in love with an oven so deeply,
I want to crawl into its
greedy mouth.
to be told that the girl is dead
to face the demand of yielding to
the clay-pot myth
woman.
but refusing attendance at the funeral,
listening to these consumptive lungs whisper:
“you are
you are
you are
- only the rot has started to set in.”
and sometimes to get to be
eaten up
by marvellous pink lips,
die little french deaths and
come
again, like jesus did.
at last,
to know that
life is nought but
a thousand small deaths
strung together by pulsating veins
brought alive by the knives
twisting in my rabbit-heart.

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Paula Heger, 19, Germany ✯ IG: @paulaeatsbooks ✯ BACK TO POETRY: OUROBOROS

“Paula Heger is 19 years old and lives in a tiny village in Germany. She loves her dog Eddi very much and spends her free-time reading, writing, roaming through the woods and wildy oscilliating between being deeply, irrevocably sad and being helplessly enamoured with words, art, love and people. She is currently planning the escape from her rural prison.”