The Diet Pill Scriptures by Jennifer Thal

My kitchen window Gods

Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Large Bathers, is a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir made between 1884 and 1887. 

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The Diet Pill Scriptures 

by Jennifer Thal

I turned to scripture in desperation

because they said we don’t have your size

in the store but we can order it online,

a secret package with contraband goods,

and I tried to crawl back into the dated canvas

of Impressionist paintings locked in stone

buildings, seeking comfort in the oiled

arms of women bathing in streams and

sunning themselves in open fields, but

found the frames broken and the figures

fled, and all that remained was a bottle

of text, inscribed with the declaration

that my body is a sin, a spawn of history

faded by varnish, that it should be reduced

pound by pound in the name of mercy

because Eve did not wear a size 16,

and that Eden does not have room

for plus-size women who are greedy

to take up space in an infinite garden.

I turned to the fatty foundations of my ancient

temple and burned it down, and began to build

a new haven made of diet pills, caffeine

headaches, and detox powders,

I opened my arms to the brethren of the BMI

and the sacred priests of the scale that stormed

the soft doors and proclaimed that there are

demons with sugar-spun claws that are holding

my smaller soul hostage, that I must banish

these creatures, burn the disciples who clutch

onto the false God of fat and stone them,

cleanse my altar and extinguish the radical

fires ignited by false prophets of self-love.

They wailed that my body is not holy

until I purge these evils from my flesh.

When I held the diet pills aloft

and kneeled, my knees were cushioned

by starved salvation and by porcelain

protection, and I heard a hallelujah

in the chorus of weight loss challenges,

and I carved from the sacred text the letters

XS into my skin.

I vowed that I would become a devout

practitioner of counting calories and pray

to the icon of a beach body, that I will

believe in a higher power of green-tea

supplements that will exorcize the hedonists

hiding in my pockets of fat, that even when

the deities of diet pills remained silent

and would not grant me the salvation

I was promised, I would behead

the betrayers, one by one until

there was nothing left but bodies

rotting in the Entrance, and the sharp

pang of glory in my empty temple.