This powerful poem comes from the perspective of an anorexic girl. Although she tries to avoid food, she is obsessed by it and sees food imagery everywhere--in her mother's "tapioca thighs," in the doctor's Popsicle stick (tongue depressor), in breasts like "shivery jello."

The girl has sexual disturbances. She says she is "king" of her body; she accuses her mother of "getting it on" with her high school teacher behind her back. She is driven by Hunger as a person, half toad, half dwarf, that lives inside her. She tries to rock him to sleep as if she were his mother. But finally she just wants to disappear where there is no pain.