In Spring by Nolan Lee (16, New Jersey)*

[content warning: eating disorder]

i’ve emerged into the town
you might call death,
of cold and austere aspect:
the clapboard houses
sewn in rows of needling teeth.
there is no excess here except
the acrid second scents of cookies,
second cake returning from sojourn
          inside this
animal of an overbalanced body,
a worthless, grunting ballast.

---

frost creeps inside the bluebells—
snow fills the waiting throat—
a great red chanticleer
struts and brags and keels,
my acids boil and froth—
michael says that all of this is
merely self-constitution, the
sculptor carving himself out of marble.
           i disagree;
i’ve committed to nothing but
simple purification of the flesh—

hear me out: hating this
house of mine, yes, but at once
expelling the dusty
hoarded bric-a-brac
into the cold, nearly feeling
the roils of disrupted dust-
and that which you’d so feared,
an empty dwelling, becomes
          a friend
uncaring of the world,
where you could decay inside.

if you must know, there is a
difference between decay
and vomit— the space between
incipient and final stages
of tuberculosis.
every path winds to here, the
town of death and
roads of death and
          rivers death
as well- all hollows, all wastings,
nothing not deprivation.

i was out of ivory
and narcissus petals
and frozen sculpture—
i was in the town of death.