This woman, big outside and cavernous inside,

hugged food, embraced wine, breathed menus,

prayed cookbooks. The black hole within her

sucked in every atom, every syllable,

every flicker of life to smother her giant

emptiness. If she stopped whirling even a moment,

she could hear atonal rebellion, forte,

in all the parts needing the fix of enough again.

Her belly pleaded, Me! Her arms cried, Hold!

Her chest yelled, Fill! Her brain screamed,

Empty again! Yet she echoed as she walked,

the beads of nothingness rolling metallically

under the ever-flapping lid of her need.

Binges of books, marathon movies,

miles and miles of the same CD

over and over, Mozart flooding the car,

soaking her ears, her mouth, her pores.

Nothing filled her completely.

Her eyes gobbled greedily,

and she swallowed sometimes

without tasting entire bags of chips and Oreos,

complete cartons of Rocky Road and Chocolate Mint

as she sometimes swallowed whole

the words and even those who whispered them

without attention to their texture or color or power.

She risked cannibalism.

She might be her own first victim.

Then one day a miracle (if she believed in miracles)

—voilà!—in the ordinary aisles

of a discount office supply store.

Neatly filled counters marched upon one another

like an army filing endlessly on parade,

boot after boot after boot after boot.

Rows and rows of boxes and boxes of paperclips,

cartons and cartons of whiteout,

stacks and stacks of retractable pens,

reams and reams of heavy bond paper,

pencils staplers erasers binders rubber bands,

all piled high, laid deep, covering long shelves,

all continuously restocked, silently

serviced before demand,

all permanently full.

This, she thought with sudden joy,

was the heaven

her drive was always seeking;

here, at last, was the satis in satisfaction.

By Susan Maxwell Campbell

From: United States