Year of the snake

The first time
I weighed myself
I was a teenager.
I was worried
I was underweight
for a blood drive.
People told me
I was pretty
in high school.
Thinking back
all I hear is
skinny. Being
diagnosed with
depression at 20,
I was prescribed
Lexapro. I gained
close to 20kg. Being
diagnosed with
PCOS at 22,
I was prescribed
weight loss. I
starved myself.
It didn’t work. I
went off Lexapro
& starved myself
again. This time
the weight came off
like limbs. See how
I did that? A poem can
survive things a body
can’t. I hacked off
my arms, my legs,
my extra chin
just to see the scale
drop. This
was always
my destiny,
being born
in the year of
the snake, to
become
all torso.

And I did, I did
change my life.

I snapped
the neck of
gravity itself
& called it

enjambment.

What do bodies
become in a poem
but symbolic
against their will?

Look here —
I set a cello
on fire

& call it
a woman.

Xiaole Zhan

Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.