Read quickly, the opening of "Fitness Suggestions" could be lifted from a magazine cover at a supermarket checkout: shred, burn, blast, torch, tear. Nothing in it is unfamiliar, and that is the point. Dominique Cyprès borrows a voice we have all heard and then lets it keep talking until it says what it actually means.
The first stanza is made of commands. There is no "I," no punctuation and no capital letters, just a stream of instructions that looks like bullet points on a poster. The verbs are the poem's key words, and hardly any of them belong to exercise. "Shred," "blast" and "torch" come from fire, explosives and demolition. The things they act on are small and domestic: abs, buns, belly fat. The mismatch is funny, since who blasts a belly, but it is also faintly unsettling, because the body is treated as a target rather than as someone's living self. The sound reinforces this. "Burn your buns" and "blast your belly fat" pile up hard b sounds that land like punches, and the lines are short enough to be shouted. "In just thirty days" is the voice of advertising, offering a deadline and a bargain. The stanza ends on the neat pairing "tear and tone," which sounds like a slogan. It also admits, almost in passing, that the process begins with ripping something apart.
The second stanza opens with "then," and the poem swerves. "Bake ninety minutes / at three hundred fifty degrees fahrenheit" is pure recipe. The lines lengthen, numbers appear, and the tone goes flat and exact, like the card on the back of a box. Looking back, "buns" was already a double meaning, the ones on a body and the ones in an oven, and the poem now cashes it in. The person ordered to burn, torch and shred has become something that goes into the oven. The instruction arrives in the same deadpan voice as everything before it, with no signal that it is a joke, which is what makes it chilling. Followed to its end, the logic of self-improvement leaves you cooked.
From there the language keeps sliding. "Destroy your waist" sets up a pun the ear cannot miss: waist becomes waste, and two lines later the poem says "lay waste to all." The word moves from a body part to devastation, and it suggests that what is being thrown away is the person. "Pillage your cellulite" borrows the vocabulary of invading armies. Cellulite is an ordinary, harmless feature of skin, but here it is cast as a village to be plundered.
The final lines widen the scale. "Lay waste to all and leave / the earth scorched behind you as you go" takes us from a stomach to the whole planet. Scorched earth is a military tactic: you burn everything as you retreat, so nothing is left for the enemy. Applied here, it makes the body both battlefield and territory, and the enemy is the self. The line break after "leave" makes the sentence hang for a moment, and the last line is the longest in the poem, unhurried, trailing off with "as you go" like someone walking away from wreckage. There is no rhyme anywhere. The poem never gives us the click of a jingle, so its ending does not close as neatly as "tear and tone" did.
The poem matters because it does not lecture. It never says that diet-and-fitness language is violent. It only extends that language a few lines further than advertising would dare, until the violence can no longer be missed. Cyprès does not need an invented image, because the found register of the genre does the work: a list of commands turns, step by step, from a slogan into a scene of destruction. The humor in the first stanza makes the second land harder, since we have already been smiling along. The poem leaves a quiet question for the reader. If we would never speak this way to a friend, why do we accept it as ordinary advice for ourselves?