Shufei Ewe

TW & CW: mentions of and references to eating disorder behaviours

people tell me i look good now that i’ve lost weight & i think about the way

i burn my tongue one too many times on

the fuel of jet black coffee, no sugar, no milk, no

weightage to work off // i scald the roof of my mouth

swallowing green tea bags whole in hopes that the

green, lean-making mix torches right through my

trachea // i scorch every sting of hunger with a dress

size smaller when i go out, and cauterise every pang

with a pinch to my ribs // i brand almost, but not yet on

the parts of me that dissipate into disorder // i watch the

brand new me gain audience-appraised approval // i singe

my body’s desires to play the part of the desired // i char

badly-angled photographs & watch them go up in flames,

with a cup of jet black coffee, inhale the fumes like incense

to incinerate my body’s unwant again and again and again.

TW & CW: mention of, and allusion to, natural disasters

your body is a temple but my body is a storm

and by that i mean –– thighs like a thunder,

making their mark in stretches,

rolling across a convex of curve and skin and

extras people are eager to shed;

i mean –– arms in the shape only excess could

take, raised to both toast and ripple,

to the beat of turmoil, a howling that hums

through cerebrum’s crux;

i say –– wrist bone clanging on watch

straps, while shoulder meets cleaver,

ankle bones that stub into corners and hips that

tear a tornado into seams;

what i mean is –– not enough and too much, all

at once, for people to take in,

wrung in the wrong places and unbridled in

others, inordinate but insufficient;

to which i wager –– where furore & cloudburst

converge, this small lull in tumult is

the charm that lies in the eye of the calamity, right

in the heart of the tempest;

by that i mean –– i’m on my way to destroy the

gated keeps of what “pretty” means,

wreck the walled-up propaganda of responsibility

when it comes to being “beautiful”.

Shufei Ewe (she/her) is a copywriter by day, insomniac by night, and overthinker all times in between. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Versification, The Adriatic Mag, HAD magazine, Capsule Stories, Ayaskala, The Bitchin’ Kitsch and more.