Heavy
by Crystal Yang
Johns Hopkins University
Crystal Yang is a first-year at Johns Hopkins University studying Applied Mathematics and Computer Science with a minor in Writing Seminars. She sees math and language as two beautiful systems for explaining the complex world around us. Her poems draw from real experience, exploring feeling, hurt, and healing. (TikTok: @crystalspoetry)
Step into the bathroom,
bright bulb, bare skin, breath held.
The scale stares back, sterile, still.
Closer each time, yet just as far.
A number that never deems you enough.
Rinse. Repeat.
Open the refrigerator,
hum, hush, hunger humming low.
Hands hover, hesitate, then halt.
You haven’t earned this. Not yet. Not ever.
Feel the fat find its way into your forbidden folds.
Rinse. Repeat.
See the tantalizing, taunting body pass,
look at her, light, lithe, less than you.
You pinch, press, pull at your stomach,
fingers full of something to fix.
Skin slips, soft, stubborn in your grip.
Rinse. Repeat.
Swallow the sob,
sweet girl, stay silent.
Enough to live, yet never enough to feel light.
Pressure persists, presses, pounds.
Weighing on you.
Weighing in you.