by Christina Berke

April Dauscha, *Examination of Conscience*, archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

(This is how you) Lose Her

Christina Berke | APR 2025 | Issue 44

You starve her then hunger finds her again and again so you give in and feed her, tummy tight as a drum, sick with sugar and sand until guilt balloons up once more. So there she is in the mirror, a dirty sad thing, alone and quiet. You lose her again—this is how. Over and over. And this is how—with 100 calorie packs and pre-packaged meals and frozen dinners made in a windowless lab by lithe limbs, microwaved in plastic trays, leaching microtoxins into three symmetrical, portioned globes of meat. You lose her with each hateful bite, each hunger pang, every muscle burning with fatigue. This is how—the sponsored makeup reels and tummy teas and popular pills and needles and lasers and Kim K and Before-and-Afters, these bodies that don’t that won’t that can’t look like hers. So take her eyes too and break them. Make her see she is not will not will never be thin enough enough enough. This is how it’s done. But she says please and thanks and more again and again because look, she’s lost once more. A body not her own seems more important. She does what you say, what you want. You say diets, you say calories in, calories out, it’s just science, you say accountability, gym buddies, calorie deficits, free apps, and this is how—creating elliptical thoughts about shaving off her cellulite, scissoring her thighs down, plucking out her stomach. It’s done like this—in the bathroom, in the park, in the car. She’s lost again, left behind in fragments. This is how it’s done, one body at a time, she loses hers, wishing it away on every birthday and flower petal and fallen lash. This is how you do it—you tell her how fat she is, you compare her to bulky things and say it’s just a joke lighten up jesus christ so sensitive. This is how you do it, subtly at first until one day she wakes up, mouth open, dry, wanting, and she just doesn’t want to do it anymore. Take her voice—she won’t need it where she’s going. Take her body—it was never hers anyway. Take her mind—she’s too distracted, fatigued, hollow to fight back because all she wants to do is lose.

Christina Berke is a Chilean-American writer based in Los Angeles. She’s been supported by Tin House, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Storyknife and elsewhere. Her memoir, Well, Body, was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International.

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, April Dauscha received her BFA in fashion design at the International Academy of Design and Technology and her MFA in fiber from Virginia Commonwealth University. April has served on the board of directors for the Surface Design Association (SDA) and is one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL). She has been represented by Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and her work has been featured in Vogue Portugal. She has exhibited her work nationally, at the Fuller Craft Museum, MANA Contemporary, and Tracey Morgan Gallery, and internationally in Berlin, Cape Town, Jerusalem, and Belgrade. She is currently heading the fiber arts program at the Fine Arts Center, a performing and visual arts high school, in Greenville, South Carolina.