To Be Fed

Please don't watch as I eat. 

I will take a piece of bread

for me, that is enough.

 I rise from my booth and walk to the door.

 

I was at a restaurant of people who have given too much to wanting.

They take and take, pulling and picking from another's plate. 

So I will stay with my crumb, 

push through those doors, walk down the street, 

and make my way home.

 

My ribs have become a staircase I climb at night, 

lying in bed, counting each rung with my fingertips. 

The points of my knuckles have become a rosary I wrap with,

bone against bone.

 

Love arrived once with its whole table.

 I took a crumb from the floor,

 left quietly as I closed the door.

 The crumb lasted me three days. 

On the fourth, I woke up thinking I had feasted.

 

I have been counting out affection like calories on a kitchen scale, 

measuring each word's weight, each touch for what it costs.

My body knows hunger 

 the way my fingers jut at the knuckles, 

how I can press between my ribs and find the ladder of myself, 

rung after rung of not enough.

 

I learned to live off crumbs. 

A maybe. A one word response. 

The corner seat at someone else's table. 

I called this sustenance.

I called this being reasonable, being low maintenance, 

not asking for the whole meal when the scraps would do.

 

But you.

You set the table and I panic at the fullness. 

The way you remember I hate tomatoes. 

How you move the hair from my eyes as I eat. 

Your love arrives unportioned, and my stomach clenches at the abundance. 

I am so full I think I might be sick.

 

This is what starvation does. 

It shrinks you. 

Makes a feast feel like an attack. 

Makes you believe that wanting more than crumbs is gluttony,

 is asking for disaster.

 

But look. My body is still here. 

These bones I have counted. 

They were made to hold weight. 

Not to survive, but to live. 

To reach for the bread, the fruit, the honey. 

To stop apologizing for my appetite.

 

You do not make me too much. 

I have been too little for too long.

So I will take a seat at your table without flinching 

as you set the plate before me. 

 

I will let myself be fed. I will understand that plenty is not poison. 

That I can take and take and take and still there will be enough.

That love is not the crumb it once was.

 

-Nevie Jay