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.