Dying To Be Thin The camera captures Ethiopian children, bellies distended, eagerly reaching for bowls of gluey gruel, while she stands, on stilt-legs, silhouetted in my office doorway. Skin like chalk, hair like straw, she wails, “I’m too fat!” pointing to an inch of concave abdomen visible between the waistline of skin-tight jeans and pale pink top, declaring “Daddy’s Girl!” in sequins. She’s determined to be the thinnest girl in tenth grade – at 85 pounds she has the dubious distinction of being the thinnest girl in the entire school, but she doesn’t believe it. She can never be thin enough. I can’t talk to this middle-class child of privilege about starving children in refugee camps or about her own calcium-starved bones. All I can do today is listen, seeing it as a sign of hope that she has come to talk, before it is too late. This poem previously appeared in The Nashwaak Review. ![]() Margaret Patricia Eaton is the author of three collections of poetry, a photographer, mixed media artist, and free lance writer, living in Moncton, NB, Canada. Her experience as a school guidance counsellor prompted her to write “Dying to be Thin”, published in The Nashwaak Review, 2004. She is thrilled that Rebecca Roach has made a donation, on behalf of this poem, to Eden Reforestation Partners (California) to plant trees in various African and Central American countries, that will rebuild forest ecosystems and help combat our climate crisis.
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