Six lines are enough to turn a body into building material. Woelfersheim's speaker begins with cement in the bloodstream and bones gone to jello, and the poem never lets go of the sense that the body's most basic workings have been corrupted. Nothing in the text says when or why it was written, and it doesn't need to say. Stomach acid on fingertips, "skin wrapped ribcages," yellow teeth, a diet food swallowed in hope: the imagery points, without ever naming it, toward an eating disorder. The "you" seems to be that disorder, personified as a mocking presence that haunts the person it lives in. A reader could also hear the "you" as a person, or as the speaker's own reflection, and the poem is richer for leaving that open.
The first stanza works by swapping what is solid and what is liquid. Blood should flow, but cement sets hard and heavy. Bones should hold a person up, but jello only wobbles. The speaker has been hollowed out and weighed down at once. The cruelty is in the detail of the "0 calorie jello I prayed would make me skinny." The food that was supposed to shrink the body has become the substance of the skeleton, so the speaker has swallowed emptiness and been made of it. The word "prayed" matters too. It casts dieting as a desperate act of faith, and it echoes in the "oh god" a line later, where the prayer has turned into a groan.
The poem is built like a mirror. In the first stanza the lines begin "My bloodstream," "My bones," "My tongue," and the speaker catalogues what has been taken over. In the second, the possessives flip to "You're," "You look," "You're," and the invader takes the floor. The hinge is the line about the tongue, "tainted with the taste of you," where the two halves touch. The senses carry the poem along: weight and texture in the first lines, then taste, smell and sight. The "you" is never a whole being. It is only a flavour, a smell and a look, which is how a haunting works, as a set of sensations that won't go away. The only simile is "You look like skin wrapped ribcages," and its stacked, unhyphenated nouns make the image look like a pile of bones with a thin covering over it.
Sound does a lot of quiet work. The poem is free verse, with long, uneven lines and no regular beat. The second line sprawls, as if it has eaten too much, while the first sits short and heavy on "cement," which rhymes with nothing. After that the poem settles into a loose pattern: "skinny" and "funny" chime in the first stanza, and "teeth" and "sleep" echo each other in the second, giving roughly ABB CDD. The first pair is the more striking. "Skinny" and "funny" sound bouncy, almost childish, and that bounce makes the line about being laughed at sting more. Even the numeral in "0 calorie" suggests a mind that has started to think in labels and counts. One small slip in the text, "You're ghost" where "Your ghost" is surely meant, does no harm. It accidentally fuses "you are" with "yours," and the line about identity and possession loses nothing.
The ending is where the poem becomes most unsettling. The ghost "lingers after dinner," at the hour when the pressure to eat or to undo eating is strongest, and then "lulls me to sleep." A lullaby is a tender thing, and putting it here suggests that the presence torments and comforts in the same breath. The poem stops on "sleep," which could mean rest, or numbness, or something darker, and it gives no recovery to lean on.
That refusal is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not glamorise thinness or turn illness into a lesson. It makes the body something to recoil from, and it shows how an illness can feel like a relationship, intimate and mocking and hard to leave. In a handful of short, hard lines it captures a feeling that clinical language often misses: being haunted by something that has settled inside you and sings you to sleep.