1,000 WORDS FOR SNOW Adolescent Anorexics: They are becoming feral and angelic,
Their hair The scent of vomit, bleach and strawberry Their eyes burning like stomach
acid They are reducing They are returning to something
everyone remembers They are ivory novices in an abbey And in their ears they always hear A scratchy voice from a swollen
of the snow-white |
1,000 WORDS FOR SNOW Christine |
The title, 1,000 WORDS FOR SNOW, comes from something I heard when I was a freshman in high schoolthat while we have only one word for snow, the Eskimos, being so dependent on it, have 1,000. While this is probably not factually true (I've heard it's only a hundred), I really liked the idea of the existence of words in other languages for things we don't give thought to. I think the word creates the concept, so in other languages there are other ideas we cannot even fit our cortex around. This poem is about how anorexics attempt to create a new concept, or word, with their bodies. --C.H.
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