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Regarding suicide and its behaviors, two lines that again and again
come to mind are i rocked shut / as a seashell (Sylvia Plath) and it slammed me
shut like a book (Anthony Bourdain), except Bourdain wasn’t writing
about self-harm, his subject there was a single bad mussell
that resulted in his poisoning, sent me crawling to the bathroom
shitting like a mink, kind of makes me think
of the publishing luncheon scene in The Bell Jar, crab salad in the centers
of avocado pears, the discussion on constructing accessories from mink tails
and then it turns out the crab was bad, the sickness rolled through me in great waves. after each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then i would feel it rising up in me again, Bourdain said don’t order
fish on a Monday, as it’s likely left over from the weekend rush stock, best to wait
for what’s fresh, though also he expressed the belief that it’s wrong
to let delicacies, even when suspect, go untried, i have no wish to die,
he wrote, but still, if you’re willing to risk some slight
lower gi distress. . . for a slice of pizza you just know has been sitting
on the board for an hour or two, why not
take a chance on the good stuff, and he mentioned, with admiration,
Rasputin, the reported routine of self-poisoning to accrue tolerance,
stave off attempts on his life, I’ve read in accounts of hunger
strikers that they sometimes come to consider their bodies
as weapons, the only weapon we have, when the doctor says suppose you
try and tell me what you think is wrong, the narrator of The Bell Jar tells us i turned
the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished
pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change
into something else, that lunch just seems
so long ago, cold chicken and the pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively
through its blanket of mayonnaise,
the yellow-green of the avocado pear, i eat men like air

Image © Jason Leung