The Alchemist Review

Noah Al-Badry’s Observing Girl X

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Poem: Observing Girl X
Poet: Noah Al-Badry
Magazine: failbetter.com
Blogger: R. Romero
http://failbetter.com/45/AlBadryGirl.php?sxnSrc=ltst

While reading the title of Observing girl X, I assumed that this would be a poem about a person who may envy this girl x or be around this girl frequently to make observations about her. However, this poem took a huge twist and was about a person who sees a girl eating a large salad and has a bag of Mars chocolate sitting next to her. The narrator states how this girl X will eat everything she can, her salad, the chocolate and anything she can afford to buy, and then go to the bathroom to purge everything she has eaten. This narrator gives a very detailed story to what they think this girl will do in the bathroom and this story caught my attention because I did not see this poem being about bulimia. It’s a strong poem because it does not hold back from the details of what a girl will do to keep herself looking skinny. I like this sentence the most out of the poem because Noha uses a technique that lets the reader know he is going to talk about bulimia, yet he uses the steps of what a women does in the bathroom to fix her makeup and image instead; “Stealthily stare until its inhabitants – a woman fixing, re-fixing her veil then applying, reapplying her mascara, her lipstick then touching up her powder for what seems like hours…and a girl with a mane of fuzzy curls washing her hands vigorously — to exit”. I find it interesting how he cuts off the sentence to go upon describing applying makeup and then the next sentence are the description and step by step direction of how girl X will make herself vomit to fix the way she thinks she looks. This was a good poem in my eyes because I like the way the story or observation was told by the narrator.

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