Eat Me Flashcards
When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake,
three layers of icing, home-made,
a candle for each stone in weight.
Thirty -> At a first reading is about age but it becomes sinister when it is about (weight)
Three layers of icing -> playing into this indulgence
Homemade -> creates a loving tone with sinister ideas
Tercet and assonant rhymes of AAA, BBB
-> subtle linkage of sounds reflects the partner’s behavior / the rhyme scheme shapes the poem in an underhanded way just as the partner coercively makes the persona shape herself in waves that are hidden in gestures of “love”
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.
Pink -> Femininity
And I ate -> Passivity of the persona
Did what I was told -> Tone of obedience and reflects the control of the persona’s partner
Taste -> difference between eating food for pleasure or necessity, or simple indulgence to increase weight -> emotional numbness and mechanical control
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.
Fat or Skinny -> Objectification works both ways
Alliteration and consonance of /d/ and /b/ give these lines the juddering quality mimicking and emphasizing the movement of the speaker’s body
Wobble -> Onomatopia
Judder like a juggernaut -> simile and alliteration / as big as a truck/sense of destructive power
The bigger the better, he’d say, I like
big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside
with multiple chins, masses of cellulite.
Constant caesura -> rushed and broken lines make it sound like the man is getting carried away / escalating almost panting at the thought of feeding the persona
Burrow -> objectification
Insistent diacope -> “girl” shows his fixation on the opposite gender but also sounds obsessive
Asyndeton -> jamming clause after clause / no pause in sight / packed with as much food and mass as possible / there is not even space for words like “and”
I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook,
my only pleasure the rush of fast food,
his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit.
Parallelism -> I and He are interchanged / similarly constructed clauses that seem like interdependence / ironic construction of the sentence
Jacuzzi -> warm comforting bath / first water imagery / hollow and filled with water / hollowing out her sense of self and replacing it with an identity with an object
My cook -> Possession/role of cook/provider
Forbidden Fruit -> alliteration draws focus into the biblical allusion to Adam and Eve
Fast Food -> mirrors forbidden fruit
Structurally they are both at the end of the sentences
Fast Food -> cheap and unhealthy
Forbidden Fruit -> desirable and tempting
The fast food and gain in weight that makes the persona desirable to her partner/partner’s lack of care and concern of how it happens and the health of the persona once again highlights the danger of this toxic interdependent relationship
Mirrors that contrast with my and his pleasure
My only pleasure / Rush / -> connotations of drugs/dependence of “only” as a qualifier shows how the toxic love has made the persona become tunnel visioned
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
Breadfruit -> tropical fruit/delicacy for a partner to relish in
Desert island after shipwreck -> metaphor / underlines how uncomfortably huge the speaker feels
Desert -> climate / deserted / highlights how the man’s abuse has isolated the speaker and stripped her of her identity
Beached whale -> no escape and immobility / being stranded and immobile is a method in which the man imprisons the persona through his coercion
Caesura -> craving a wave -> slows the poem to a complete stop / “whale” and “craving” -> ay sounds like a cry
Tidal wave -> power and hugeness of persona/metaphor suggests the speaker’s own vastness/ great power of a wave when it crashes onshore / foreshadows the fact that the partner’s abuse will bring about the destruction
Enjamberment -> evokes the momentum and power of the metaphorical wave the idea of it spilling over from one line to the next
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-built.
Anaphora -> Too fat to / relentless “fat” shows how the speaker has come to become defined by her physical appearance
The persona can not leave her partner because she is dependent on him for validation something that the general populace are often against
She can not go to shops to buy “full-fat milk” -> she can not feed herself is the irony / only her partner can / judging of others
She can not be an “emotional shield” -> because rather than being invisible the persona feels exposed by a world which body shames
The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke
my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed.
He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat.
I allowed -> change of power / gaining agency
Globe -> Largeness
Flesh flow -> alliteration and metaphor allude to a sexual encounter
Oil down throat -> grotesque image that suggests how the abuser has gone too far
Soon you’ll be forty… he whispered, and how
could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned
in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.
You’ll be forty now echoes the start of the poem
Drown -> loss of power to feed and also speak to the persona
Metaphor -> back to the idea of the tidal wave -> overwhelming power comes back
I left him there for six hours that felt like a week.
His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed.
There was nothing else left in the house to eat.
End stopped lines -> slows the poem all the way to a near halt / mirrors the way time is changing and slowing down
“Mouth open” -> mirrors the oil scene/irony in the switch of power
“Bulging with greed” -> plosive
Last line
->Devouring her own partner/dangerousness of an abusive relationship
-> Starved of love
