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Girlhood

December 25, 2019/ Stephanie Teasley

i am six when i am called fat for the first time.
late spring, snack time at daycare, two oreos on a paper plate.
a still life, if you will: outside the window the peonies are blooming,
so swollen & violent with the fullness of being. i feel overripe,
too soft, like a cosmos-bruised plum from the supermarket clearance.
that afternoon, undeveloped photograph: i brush it off,
laugh & blow a raspberry, eat another oreo just out of spite.
but come night, i cry into my toys’ stuffed bellies: & the shadows develop—
i am eight when i begin romanticizing bags of all sorts:
paper bags, ziploc bags, plastic bags the milky blush of magnolias.
i don’t want to be a body—i want to be a bag.
i want to hold things close in my folds, to gape,
to tip back & swallow the heavens, an atom on a needle-prick. the year of ratty t-shirts & baggy jeans, tangled hair
like chicken nests. i am mud-christened, keep the blisters & scraped knees as a promise of my appetite.
i am ten when i discover what that word means,
girl
_

something so vicious teachers made us turn in signed permission slips.
we promise not to scream. teacher shoos the boys out of the room
& rolls in the old tv, a woman suddenly illuminated on screen,
the body elongating indefinitely as two panna cotta-breasts emerge.
all of us hold our breaths, transfixed: this is what we could be. girl
?—
girl
?—sphinx, goddess, succubus, cobra lily.
to be thin is to be secretive, saintly, savage, carnivorous—
i am twelve when i lose my period—
that is to say, i’ve inverted your darling dearest rituals, your hunches,
i’ve created beauty from negative space, devoured myself. look, i am two-dimensional & your exercise in linear perspective.
i am the blade at an angle without shadow,
honed myself to a splinter of this emaciated day.
look at me: i am the tightrope for you to teeter between afterlife & art.
but wasn’t beauty always terrifying, the absence of the earthly?
i am
destroying,
destroyed: starved
gasping body
to bone
go inward
& sculpt my image
[
]
i am sixteen when the first streak of dawn returns, moon-haunted,
scathed from the ruins of the bombed cathedral.
a trip to the doctor reveals i’ve gained twenty pounds this year:
see, you’re beautiful just the way you are

.

perfectly healthy

.

but here are the orchids in the waiting room—
i whisper: how does it feel, the loneliness of your bodies
blossoming in the slender stalks? would you have rathered the
sturdy trunks like redwoods, unselfconscious, sawn by the lumbermen?

Lydia Wei is a seventeen-year old writer and artist from Gaithersburg, MD. Her work has been previously recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Young Poets Network. She volunteers with Writopia Lab DC to promote creative writing for children, and with Arts on the Block to create mosaics and public art installations for her community.

School Lunch Archive

  • 2021
  • 2020
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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Valerie-Headshot-2.jpg 2000 1500 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-06-13 11:55:462025-06-17 17:55:59Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Gale-Headshot-01July2024.jpg 1791 1587 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-05-09 11:55:262025-06-17 18:07:25Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mitko_Grigorov.jpg 378 300 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-03-14 11:00:082025-03-31 11:51:57Products of Our Environment

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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lauren-Howard-credit-Terril-Neely-scaled-773x1030-1.jpg 1030 773 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-05-23 23:59:492025-06-17 18:29:02Dig Into Genre

The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/paparouna-photo.jpeg 960 720 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-04-25 23:55:312025-04-24 15:06:46The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/20220807-ariadnesaxt-MurielReid-01.jpg 1123 2000 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-03-28 23:55:152025-03-31 11:49:32On The Map

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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / paparouna
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TaharBekri.jpg 512 340 paparouna https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png paparouna2025-06-06 11:00:072025-06-17 18:56:48Tale of the resistant apple tree

Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ghazal-headshot.jpg 867 590 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-05-30 11:00:492025-06-17 18:59:20Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-05-16 11:00:362025-06-17 19:02:56we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

More Amuse-Bouche »

Word From the Editor

The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.

Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.

More from the current editor »
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