Eat Me - Patience Agbabi
Eat Me - Patience Agbabi The Poem: When I hit thirty, he bought me a cake, three layers of icing, home-made a candle for each stone in weight The icing was white but the letters were pink, they said, EAT ME. And I ate, did what I was told. Didn’t even taste it. Then he asked me to get up and walk round the bed so he could watch my broad belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut. ‘The bigger the better’ he’d say, I like big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside with multiple chins, masses of cellulite. I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook, my only pleasure was the rush of fast food, his please, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit. His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck. Or a beached whale on a king-size bed craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk, too fat to use fat as an emotional shield, too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-buil...