A Body Under Control
Eleni Cay
Content warning: eating disorders, body dysmorphia
Harald prepares her breakfast. Egg on toast.
Black coffee. Just like she says she likes it.
‘Sorry, I’ll grab something on the way’.
Breakfasts are for lazy people. Her clock
ticks in premium intervals. #BulimiaRecovery
are the trending hashtags in her timeline for today.
She storms into the Committee Room, no espresso
in her hand. The PA immediately makes her one, offers
to carry it on a tray, but she holds the cup through her
long sleeve, two for one, she covered her sticking-out
wrist bone. ‘Success comes from sacrifice’. She delivers
the presentation, feels dizzy at the end, has to count
three times how many attendees raised their Zoom hands.
A five-minute break. She scrolls down news feeds, replies
to the most urgent emails. What did Harald pack for lunch?
Potato salad. ‘Can’t afford a slump!’ she throws it in the bin,
shakes off the dreaded energy drop, the fear of impaired
judgment induced by Harald’s ‘Love You’ post-it-note.
8:30PM, her Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn are full of afterwork
pints. She has never held a tall glass. She rarely touches anything,
pays contactless for fast track, only carries a phone
in her iconic black bag. Harald rings her ̶ the fifth time.
She cuts the ringing short, types a chunk of her report.
Puts one ice cube on top of her hand to ease the Carpal Tunnel,
one ice cube in her mouth to keep her awake. ‘Darling,
come to bed, it’s 2 AM’. She presses the nightgown tight
to her slim body, doesn’t like loose-fitting flared cotton,
prefers to wear a uniform: one for the boss, one for Harald,
one for the child that was supposed to change it all but that
in the tenth week stopped growing and never saw her wearing
the beige breastfeeding top. Natural occurrence. She dashes the tear
away. The clock keeps feeding her to-do-list; she squeezes it in her fist,
but the list grows bigger, its wide-open mouth devours the table,
the fridge with bills that are again overdue, the city that never sleeps,
the land that bred feminists bleeding in Corporate Blue.
The Science
The poem is inspired by social media and social psychology qualitative research on young women's body image struggles and pressure to cope with the work demands in urbanised environments.
The Poet
Eleni Cay (she/her) is a Slovakian-born poet living in England and Norway. Her award-winning first collection was published in Slovak (Cakanka Press), German (Hein Verlag), English (Parthian Books). Her first two pamphlets were published by Westbury Arts Centre as part of her poetry residency and her third pamphlet was published by Eyewear Press. Eleni’s poems appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Acumen, Atticus Review, The Cardiff Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Her chapbook Celestial Heteroglossia was published by Poetry Space and her second collection titled Love Algorithm by Black Spring Press. Eleni is known for her multimedia poetry, which has been screened at international festivals and featured on Button Poetry. For more information, visit the poet’s website at www.eleni-cay.com.
Author’s Note
All possible interpretations of the poem are possible and welcome, open to readers’ own interpretation. The poem illustrates the contextual factors that are at play when a personal struggle occurs. While political and systemic factors influence a woman’s eating problems and mental health issues, they are not causal. The studies examining these issues are of correlational nature and it is my strong preference to not attribute causality in the poem. It is neither the woman’s, nor the system’s fault that she over-works or had lost a baby. It is a complex amalgam of mutually reinforcing factors and I tried to bring in their mutual influences into the poem.
Eating disorder recovery is complex, there are several articles that could be mobilised to offer support to the thesis in the poem. I would like to add this reference:
LaMarre, A., & Rice, C. (2017). Hashtag recovery: #Eating disorder recovery on Instagram. Social Sciences, 6(3), 68.
The article is open access and Consilience readers might find the insights helpful in contextualising the poem. In the poem, one of the hashtags that LaMarre and Rice (2017) researched appears. I also added to the protagonist’s internal speech (“Natural occurrence”) to make a connection to what LaMarre and Rice describe as “biopolitical pedagogy of recovery”: “The recovery pedagogy is biopolitical—it involves proactive and continual self-monitoring, comparison, and alteration of bodies”.
Next poem: A Quantum of Truth by Roger Suffling