Melissa Broder--Poems on E.D.'s

Melissa Broder, author of the newly published, When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother, sent me a couple of her poems that relate to e.d.'s.  See below for the inspiration for her work.

Core vs. Flex
Madame Famine is hairless apart
from her lanugo, and when she sucks you into
her glory hole, a bald telephone, it’s

wrong. You’re supposed to be the one who’s lived
a thing or two, you’re supposed to be teaching her
to grow. There’s no room to live inside

her little Grey Gardens, so try and
let go. Stop lining up lacy aprons
with training bras and just have a damn happy

accident. You are frightened of going
over. You are not as fragile as you think.
Madame Famine should be left to rot in her

dream car with a frozen Jenny Craig
glazed salmon. Of course, she would rather
ride the bumper cars with your husband.


Prayer of the Teenage Waifs

We want security and we want out!
The groceries have cobwebs. French toast sticks
and sickie chicken sausages turn lettuce
for breakfast. Put dinner in a locket,
then sniff to get to clavicle heaven
where Mommy gets pinched and shock treatments
are ice capades, Sweet’N Low sensations

of Fatherland. Oh Fatherland! She’s been
a bad babysitter. Deliver us
from Burger King with People magazine.
Let the basement be our basement, the bones
and ringtones our only breath in mirrors;
let mammaries unbloom, let fumes be food
and we’ll massacre into cylinders.

Regarding the inspiration, Melissa writes:

In Core vs. Flex, the character of Madame Famine came to me in a dream. To me she’s restrictive eating-personified, though my publisher and editor, who are both male, think she is a well-groomed nether-region. The poem was actually longer in another incarnation, involving Oreos, but that piece didn’t make the cut.

Prayer of the Teenage Waifs arose experimentally. I used one of my favorite writing devices, which is to comprise a list of nouns from the lyrics of a particular rock band and then construct a poem using those nouns. This time it was The Ramones. If you look at their canon, you’ll find the nouns in this poem (from “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” to “Hangin' out on 2nd Avenue/Eatin' chicken Vindaloo.”) Also, I was taking a prosody class and asked to write in iambic pentameter, so most of the poem is metered that way.
The title of the book is the punchline to a joke: “What’s a Freudian Slip?” I felt that it captured the tone of the book, which is playful, yet mild to moderately neurotic.