OZEMPIC ERA

So divorced from the swirl of sounds, I didn’t know,

the specifics. Of course I knew the tilt we turn on,

the posters at the bus stops when I stumble

before I sit, young and wincing and dizzy.

Iona tells me we’re waiting for Ariana Grande to die.

I go to the ‘gram to gape at this skeleton

swill horror and envy. This lovely skeleton

pressing at her skin, demanding to be known

before the revelation of dying.

My hipbones are hiding and I settle on

bigger t-shirts. Make myself dizzy

by swiftly standing, to remember my stumble

into skinniness last year, the constant stumbling

consciousness, finding sharp skeleton

edges, contradictions that dizzy

all I know that I know.

A body I had never tried on

before. And I didn’t want to die.

This was how to die.

When I make plans now, I stumble

and chew whilst the night goes on

and my therapist sketches a skeleton

of another new life I can know

where I loathe this dizziness.

I don’t. Reach instead for that dizzying

sensation of a body scared it’s dying,

the fumbling mental numbness still knowing

I’ll never measure up. Bread stumbles

around my lips. I flaunt my skeleton

only by flashing my teeth. Buses roll on

past their adverts. Superdrug has an offer on

for GPL1 consultations. Summer is dizzy

and when the trees all turn skeletal

I’ll try my best to mimic how the leaves die,

paper thin and brittle and wind-caught and stumbling

to the ground and admired, or else known.

I lock my phone and Ariana’s skeleton disappears. I put my shades on.

I didn’t know about CMAT’s post, Iona sends it to me, later I read that her dizzy

genius is asked to die over her body. I had breakfast. My breath stumbles.