Reunion
Caroline Rothstein
When he made fat jokes,
when he said, “How do you think you got so big?”
when he said, “You should eat fruit, not the junk food,”
when he said, “Are you really going to eat dinner?”
when he drew a picture of me on the white wall as a puffy cartoon figure,
when he said, “Is that entire pizza for you?”
when he told me that I was going to break the chair, that it wouldn’t hold my weight,
when he said, well, it's the truth, right,
when he said I shouldn’t give him bullshit excuses for the last two years of my life,
when he said the eating disorder didn’t matter,
when he told me war
and robbery
and rape
are natural human instincts,
I thought:
this
is what war
can do
to a man.