The speaker of "Anorexic" seems to be talking about an eating disorder from the inside, and the poem is as fragmented and unsteady as the mind it describes. It opens with a strange phrase: "a fat lie / about myself." The word "fat" is doing double duty. A lie can be big and bloated, but the word also points to the very thing the speaker is afraid of. The speaker is not just hiding something; they are building a story, and they are "preparing" it, as if it takes careful work.
The lines that follow are hard to pin down, and that seems deliberate. The sentences break off and slide into each other. The speaker's "fear of fat" appears to rule everything, and the phrase "I gain and so / a little off" suggests that even a small change feels like something going wrong. The poem ends on the stark, unfinished "who is ill," which reads as both a question and an accusation. The mood is anxious, secretive and uneasy, and the broken syntax leaves us feeling how confusing it is to be inside this thinking.