Bulimia as Viral Sensation

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Thin is in again, product of a twenty-year trend cycle
and I must be getting old or sick because, nostalgia,
that suspicious pop-up, turns the forums nobler, edgier,
in my memory than what followed. Sick or old, I remember
early-internet days of blog post and frenzy:
the supermarket’s aisles gleamed to porcelain;
desire persistent as a knife tugging at meat. I remember
scrolling the buffets of bulimics — bursting fondant,
cheese pull so erotic — years of hungry photographs and later
the sticky-lipped Mukbangs of wet chew and cut before
swallow, the obvious chew-and-spit of it, dribbling orgasms
of bloodshot edits, viewers pausing their hunger
with sensory distraction. Profitable bulimia;
self-funding bulimia – and the unspoken change as they flipped
to restriction: fat oozing cream-cakes; golden spills of butter;
violent-pink lobster claws replaced with sugar-free jelly
slurped up like molluscs. And of course everything delicious-
best-ever-got-to-try-it, licking salt from frosted lips as they groaned
like pornographic mattresses. Meanwhile, viewers in the pulsing
dark of their rooms, alone, hunger lodged in their throats like fishbones.