CW: drugs, disordered eating/body image, light body horror

PRINCESS DIARIES NO. 1: BELLE

I made a tiny sandwich that caused me to dissociate

when I raised one neatly sliced half to my mouth.

Dwarfed, as it was, by my hand, it looked like a sandwich 

might look on psilocybin mushrooms:

sort of funny 

sort of terrifying

& in that shroomy space between the giggles & the screams

— which I imagine is the neat slice between each hemisphere of my brain— 

there’s a ticklish spot that goes hahaha! nonono!

& that’s where I found Belle:

laid out in the gutter of my corpus callosum

crying plaintively

Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour!

PRINCESS DIARIES NO. 2: ARIEL

There’s the Ariel whose tongue was cut out

who became seafoam

then there’s the Ariel who kept her tongue 

& became, presumably, happy.

The piece that matters, though, is this:

that both prayed for transformation,

that both saw the boy,

and that’s when they knew:

what’s the word? 

burn. 

& isn’t this why little boys like me were discouraged

from learning myths like this?

& didn’t you feel desire at a tender age?

& didn’t you find a place to put it?

I was like Ariel—  

I wished.

Would lay in bed and pray:

make me thinner make me thinner make me thinner

which feels dangerously close to:

I’m a sinner I’m a sinner I’m a sinner

and I can see now

that this desire for divine erasure

was really me praying:

let me be her let me be her let me be her.

Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a queer writer from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, perhappened mag, DEAR Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “Ken” won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and their chapbook “Teems///\\\Recedes” is forthcoming from Kelp Books . Caleb has an MA in English Literature from Cal Poly State University, where he works as a librarian and English instructor.