Beauty standards

I find little satisfaction in gazing upon creamy white breasts
or upon a woman combing her hair – let's make it ugly:
a lost body at the bottom of a ravine, the girl who was thrown
from her car and spent hours hanging from a transmission tower
by a broken leg, her arm only holding on by the skin on her back

my psychologist said I too am under a lot of tension; not that it
surprised me, but still: I want to be beautiful, but at night I pick
at my cuticles, study the calluses on the soles of my feet,
slowly pull out the threads that bind my skin – when I was little,
they made me wear gloves to keep me from scratching, I said

magazines laid in the waiting room with tips on how to not fall apart
when your collagen breaks down, shiny white teeth, how to style
your hair, how to make your body bikini ready, how to get men to –

in a museum I saw the human nervous system, stripped
from a body: the brain like a flower with a stem made
out of spinal cord, branched offshoots where the limbs
used to be, nerve cells like roots, like those of the avocado
seeds I grow on water at home, oddly white, and it
made me realize that inwardly, humans are just like plants

when I got home, I discovered a fray near my collarbone
and pulled: the wires snapped like the power lines of the pylon
when they got the girl down – under my torn skin I found
a network that glows in the dark, my own skyline with sky-
scrapers, and freeways transporting the light inside of me