The Full Text of “Eat Me”
The Full Text of “Eat Me”
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“Eat Me” Introduction
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The contemporary British poet Patience Agbabi first published "Eat Me" in her 2008 collection Bloodshot Monochrome. The speaker in the poem is a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Her male partner, obsessed with fat women, feeds her incessantly, and the speaker becomes dependent on him for her one brief "pleasure" in life: the "rush of fast food." Eventually, she becomes so big that she is able to suffocate her partner with her own body, freeing her from his control. The poem highlights the emotional complexity and slow violence of domestic abuse, as well as the dehumanizing power of sexist objectification.
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“Eat Me” Summary
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When I turned thirty, my partner brought me a cake. It had three layers of frosting and was home-made—but the candles were there to mark each stone (14 lbs) of my weight, not my age.
The cake had white frosting with pink lettering that spelled out: "eat me." I did what the lettering said and ate the whole cake, without even tasting it.
Then my partner asked me to get up and walk around the bed. He wanted to watch my belly shaking, and my hips quaking, big as a truck.
He used to tell me that he liked girls to be as big as possible. I like big girls with soft flesh, he'd say, girls that I can tunnel into, girls with many chins and loads of fat.
I was like his warm, comforting bathtub, but he was my feeder, and my only brief joy was gobbling down fast food; his joy was to watch me get fatter, as if I were some kind of ripening, tempting fruit.
I was his tropical breadfruit, or a desert island for him to land on after a shipwreck. Or I was a whale washed up on the king-sidze bed, longing for a wave to come and take me away. Or I was a tidal wave, but made of flesh rather than water.
I was too fat to escape, or even to buy fatty milk from the shops; I was too fat to use my fatness as protection, and I was beyond the size that could be euphemistically called "chubby" or "big-boned."
When I turned thirty-nine, I let my partner stroke my huge, round cheek. Our flesh merged together. He told me to open my mouth, and made me drink straight olive oil.
He whispered in my ear: "Soon you'll be forty." When I heard that, how could I resist rolling over on top of him? He suffocated under my weight. My body muffled his dying words.
I let him lie there dead for six hours, which felt more like a week to me. His mouth was ajar, and his eyes bulged with frozen desire. There was nothing to eat left in the house.
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“Eat Me” Themes
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Sexism, Objectification, and Dehumanization
In Patience Agbabi’s “Eat Me,” the female speaker’s partner objectifies, devalues, and abuses her, fattening her up to satisfy his own sexual appetite. Her partner can only see the speaker as a sexual object rather than a real person; he treats her as though she’s food that exists solely for his consumption. Through this, the poem suggests that men’s sexist objectification of women is an act of violence, dehumanizing women and eating away at their sense of self.
The speaker’s partner doesn’t really care about her health or happiness: he just cares about making her look a certain way in order to conform to his own desires. He likes “big girls, soft girls,” the speaker says, and wants to “burrow inside” their “masses of cellulite.” He doesn’t value his partner as an individual, but just sees her as a means to an end—like a goose to fatten up for a feast. He wants to watch her “broad / belly wobble” and see her wide hips jiggle, essentially forcing her to perform for his own gratification.
Though women often feel societal pressure to be thin rather than fat, the specific desire here doesn’t really matter: the poem is about the absurdity and unfairness of demanding that women conform to any ideals imposed on them by a man. The point is that through expecting the speaker to look a certain way, her partner strips her of her individuality; what matters is her body, not her.
This objectification eats away at the speaker’s sense of self: she becomes passive and hollow, unable to enjoy her own life. She eats the cake he brings her without even tasting it, for instance—implying that the situation is grinding her down and making her numb. She also calls herself her partner’s “Jacuzzi,” “forbidden fruit,” “desert island,” and other surreal comparisons—all of which show that she has come to understand herself as an object, too. She even becomes “too fat to leave” and calls her own body “his flesh,” showing that the way his attitude "eats away" at her ability to act in her own interest. Objectification, the poem ultimately implies, is a kind of violence that robs objectified people of their humanity.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 7-9
- Lines 10-12
- Lines 13-24
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Power, Abuse, and Control
“Eat Me” explores the complicated dynamics of coercion, power, and abuse. The speaker’s partner dominates her by controlling her body, ultimately making her so fat and powerless that she becomes dependent on him. In this way, the poem can perhaps be read as an extended metaphor for the way in which domestic abuse wears victims down until it’s nearly impossible for them to escape.
The poem suggests that abuse depends in part on coercion and manipulation. There are elements of the man’s behavior that, on the surface, make it seem like he values the speaker—when in actual fact, he is merely trying to transform her into the ultimate object of his desires. The man buys the speaker a birthday cake at the start of the poem, for instance, and he lavishes attention on her throughout. But this all to serve his own aim: to make her as fat as possible.
This objectification, in turn, is inextricable from the desire to hold power over another person. Because the speaker doesn’t really see his partner as someone with wants, needs, and desires of her own, he feels entitled to tell her what to do. And the speaker, her own sense of self whittled down to nearly nothing by abuse, acquiesces.
In fact, the man’s behavior erodes the speaker’s identity to the point that she can hardly imagine herself outside of this situation, let alone actually escape. She becomes passive and helpless, seemingly resigned to her fate as she declares herself “too fat to late, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk.” Her partner seems to hold all the cards, making the speaker more and more dependent on him.
The speaker has thus become imprisoned by her abuser and his behavior. And when, at the end of the poem, the speaker smothers her boyfriend with her body, it’s not clear if this is a genuine liberation. Much irreversible violence, both bodily and psychological, has already taken place. And there’s nothing “left to eat”—an ambiguous final line that might represent the speaker’s new start, but just as likely might represent how emotionally hungry and empty she feels despite having “escaped” her abuser.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-30
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Eat Me”
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Lines 1-3
When I hit ...
... stone in weight.In the first stanza, the speaker begins the story of her abusive relationship with an unnamed man. Though the poem may not be a literally true story, the toxic dynamics between the speaker and her partner feel all too real—and the poem's dark humor thus feels especially sinister.
The speaker starts by remembering the day she turned 30, which should have been a joyful milestone in her life. And, right on cue, her partner seems to have thoughtfully made her a birthday cake, complete with "three layers of icing." How thoughtful!
Except, this is not a birthday cake. This is a weight-gain cake, celebrating the fact that the speaker is getting fatter and fatter, just as her partner wants her to. Of course, the huge, sugary cake itself is part of this plan. The candles mark, not the speaker's life in years, but her weight in stone (a unit of measure equal to 14 pounds).
Already, then, the speaker is being devalued and objectified—treated like livestock being fattened up for slaughter. Her partner celebrates, not an important moment in her life, but his own selfish glee that her body is meeting his standards.
These first three lines—which establish the poem's tercet stanza form—also put in place the poem's unusual rhyme scheme. Each stanza effectively has three of the same rhyme sound: AAA, BBB, and so on. But these are not full rhymes, but assonant rhymes: that is, they share the same vowel. In the first stanza, for instance, "cake," "made," and "weight" all use a long /ay/ sound.
This subtle linkage of sounds reflects the partner's behavior: the rhyme scheme here shapes the poem in an underhanded way, just as the partner coerces the speaker into "shaping" herself the way he wants through selfish gestures of "love."
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Lines 4-6
The icing was ...
... even taste it. -
Lines 7-9
Then he asked ...
... like a juggernaut. -
Lines 10-12
The bigger the ...
... masses of cellulite. -
Lines 13-15
I was his ...
... like forbidden fruit. -
Lines 16-18
His breadfruit. His ...
... craving a wave. -
Lines 18-21
I was a ...
... chubby, cuddly, big-built. -
Lines 22-24
The day I ...
... down my throat. -
Lines 25-27
Soon you’ll be ...
... dying sentence out. -
Lines 28-30
I left him ...
... house to eat.
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“Eat Me” Symbols
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The Cake
The cake the partner gives the speaker at the beginning of the poem is a symbol of objectification and cruelty.
In the poem's opening, it's the speaker's birthday. Her partner gives her a cake—but that cake has nothing to do with the speaker turning thirty. In fact, it celebrates her weight gain, with a candle for each stone (or 14 pounds) of her weight, rather than for each of her years on the planet!
To understand the symbolism here, think about what a birthday cake usually symbolizes. It represents people taking the time to celebrate someone that they love. It shows somebody that people are thinking of them, and that they are worth celebrating. But by giving the speaker a weight-gain cake, the speaker's partner isn't celebrating her: he's serving his own desires. His cake symbolizes how much he objectifies her—how, in his eyes, she only exists in order to fulfill his sexual desires.
The cake thus represents a relationship gone bad: this symbol of caring has turned into a symbol of abuse.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-6: “When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake, / three layers of icing, home-made, / a candle for each stone in weight. / The icing was white but the letters were pink, / they said, eat me. And I ate, did / what I was told. Didn’t even taste it.”
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“Eat Me” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The alliteration in "Eat Me" helps to evoke the speaker's appearance, her partner's obsession with her weight, and the difference between their two experiences of this abusive relationship.
The first examples of alliteration appear in the third stanza:
Then he asked me to get up and walk
round the bed so he could watch my broad
belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut.The round /b/ sounds here evoke the speaker's own roundness (and chime with the /b/ in "wobble"); the letter even looks like a belly. "Judder" and "juggernaut"—which are also assonant—conjure a picture of a jelly-like wobbling, which is exactly what the speaker's partner wants to see.
Soon after this stanza, the partner talks about his desire for fat women. "The bigger the better," he says in line 10, the alliteration making it seem like a pithy saying that he uses all the time (and chiming with the /b/ in the previous stanza). And the repeated /m/ sounds in "Multiple chins, masses of cellulite" in line 12 feel dense, evoking the "masses" of flesh the partner fetishizes.
Alliteration also draws attention to some meaningful comparisons between the speaker's and her partner's different experiences. For instance, the speaker's "only pleasure," for many years, is "fast food," while her partner likes to see her "swell like forbidden fruit." These two moments of /f/ alliteration invite the reader to notice that, while the speaker can only take pleasure in cheap "fast food," her partner relishes the "forbidden fruit" of her body as if he were in Eden itself. Her life thus feels sad and limited compared to his fantasy-world.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 8: “bed,” “broad”
- Line 9: “belly,” “judder,” “juggernaut”
- Line 10: “bigger the better”
- Line 12: “multiple,” “masses”
- Line 14: “fast food”
- Line 15: “forbidden fruit”
- Line 19: “full-fat”
- Line 21: “big-built”
- Line 23: “flesh,” “flesh flowed”
- Line 24: “olive,” “oil”
- Line 27: “drowned,” “dying”
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Allusion
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Assonance
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Asyndeton
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Irony
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Simile
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"Eat Me" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Stone
- Juggernaut
- Judder
- Burrow
- Cellulite
- Breadfruit
- Beached
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(Location in poem: Line 3: “a candle for each stone in weight”)
A unit of weight equal to 14 pounds.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Eat Me”
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Form
"Eat Me" is built from ten brief tercets (three-line stanzas). This tight form gives the poem a tense and restrictive atmosphere—as though the poem, like the speaker, is being controlled.
The poem is a dramatic monologue, a kind of poem in which the poet behaves like an actor, taking on the first-person voice of a vivid character. (In Agbabi's book Bloodshot Monochrome, "Eat Me" appears in a whole section of "Monologues" in different voices.) Like a lot of dramatic monologues, this one tells a startling story, moving from the speaker's constrained, static life with her abusive partner to the climactic breaking point when she finally fights back.
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Meter
"Eat Me" doesn't have a strict meter, an effect that makes the poem feel deceptively calm. Because the poem's rhythms feel natural and conversational rather than formal and poetic, the speaker sounds matter-of-fact as she describes the horrors of her abusive relationship. It's as if years of suffering have numbed her. This unassuming tone makes the poem's darkly ironic ending feel all the more striking.
While the poem doesn't have a regular meter, it does use rhythm and sound to make meaning. For instance, the lines get steadily, subtly longer as the poem goes on: the poem slowly swells, just as the speaker does under her partner's abusive diet regime.
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Rhyme Scheme
There is a regular—but very subtle—rhyme scheme at work throughout the poem. It runs like this:
AAABBBCCC
...and so on. But these are not typical full rhymes—these are slant rhymes based on assonance; the rhyme words share a vowel sound, but that the surrounding consonants are different.
Here is stanza three, for example:
Then he asked me to get up and walk
round the bed so he could watch my broad
belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut.This subtle, disguised rhyme scheme mirrors how the speaker's partner keeps an underhanded hold on her, disguising his manipulative feeding as love.
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“Eat Me” Speaker
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This poem is a dramatic monologue. Though the speaker uses the first-person pronoun throughout, she isn't the poet herself. Instead, the speaker is a voice for the many women who get trapped in abusive relationships.
The speaker's matter-of-fact voice makes it feel as if she's gotten numb to her partner's cruelty. For instance, when she eats the cake he brings her to celebrate, not her thirtieth birthday, but her weight gain, she eats it without even tasting it, and describes this awful moment in short, straightforward lines.
Later in the poem, she defines herself by her partner's standards, using a series of strange metaphors in which she seems to understand herself only as a huge body (e.g. "His desert island after shipwreck" in line 16). Long years of abuse have clearly eaten away at her sense of self.
But the speaker also reveals flashes of dark humor—especially at the end of the poem, when she ironically triumphs over her abuser. While she certainly doesn't get an uncomplicated happy ending, she does manage, at last, to fight back.
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“Eat Me” Setting
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The poem is set over the course of roughly ten years, starting on the speaker's 30th birthday and ending when she kills her partner on her 39th birthday. These long years get compressed into a relatively short space, drifting by between lines 13 ("I was his Jacuzzi...") and 22 ("The day I hit thirty-nine..."). That compression evokes the speaker's sense that her life has been stolen, eaten up by her abusive partner.
The poem's physical setting is less specific: all we know is that the speaker and partner share a house. But the speaker doesn't seem to go far beyond that house, and her world feels claustrophobic: at her lowest point, she feels "too fat" even to go out to the grocery store. The speaker is trapped in an abusive relationship, a stigmatized body, and an unkind world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Eat Me”
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Literary Context
Patience Agbabi (1965-present) is a contemporary British poet. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex and now lectures at the University of Wales in Cardiff.
Agbabi's poetry has its roots in the London spoken-word poetry scene of the late 1990s. The spoken word genre takes inspiration from hip-hop as well more old-school forms of poetry, and spoken word artists often perform at poetry slams. While "Eat Me" is a tightly-controlled poem written for the page, its emphasis on sound—particularly in the use of assonant rhymes—hints at Agbabi's involvement in performance poetry.
Agbabi herself cites influences on her own work ranging from older poets like Geoffrey Chaucer (whose Canterbury Tales she retold in a 2014 book, Telling Tales) all the way to contemporary writers like Carol Ann Duffy.
"Eat Me" appears in Agbabi's third full-length collection, Bloodshot Monochrome (2008). The poem is a dramatic monologue, and is drawn from an entire section of "Monologues." Many of the other poems in the book deal with issues related to gender, misogyny, and race. Poems like "Skins" and "Comedown" look at the dynamics of power and marginalization, just as "Eat Me" shows how a controlling individual is able to eat away at another person's identity over time.
Historical Context
"Eat Me" focuses on male power over women's bodies—a major topic of discussion when this poem was first published in 2008, and for years before and since.
The poem gestures at contemporary discussions of objectification and women's body image in general. Objectified by her partner, a "feeder" (that is, a person who fetishizes fat and forces their partners to get fatter), the speaker is also objectified by a wider world that demands that women be thin.
Both of these demands, the poem implies, are violent, reducing women to mere consumable bodies. The poem criticizes the very idea of women being forced to conform to any body standard.
These ideas have been important in feminist thought for a long time. Thinkers from Susie Orbach (with her 1978 Fat is a Feminist Issue) to Sonya Renee Taylor (with her 2018 The Body is Not an Apology) have argued that the objectification of women's bodies is all part of a deeper cultural sexism—a problem that people of all genders need to confront.
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More “Eat Me” Resources
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External Resources
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Agbabi's Spoken-Word Poetry — Watch a video of Agbabi performing some of her poetry (and get a sense of her rhythmic spoken-word style).
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Patience Agbabi, and hear a couple of her poems read aloud.
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Agbabi in Conversation — The poet talks about her life and work.
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Agbabi on Writing — Listen to Agbabi discussing her writing process.
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