Now, I, no more,go out,
missing, a lot,no doubt!

sweet little flower,

he said,

you are not ready for this world.

silly boy. he should know

that when my soul meets the world

all it will see

is a darkness that matches it

maggots feasting on a butterfly’s corpse
    One time a boy kissed me

the ruined back post-bullet
    He spun me in his strong arms

wasp nest humming in a yellowed skull
    Said he loved me with fierceness

shrapnel lodged in a spine somewhere
    Told me he would never let me go

blood and water mixing in the sink
    But he did. He did

body on the beach, pale and bloated
    In my nightmares I see him walking away

wild dogs with intestines in their jaws
    I see glimpses of another life

the slow swing of a fist
    In those, he holds me in his strong arms

bruised blue cheek, uglier for its healing
    In those, he does not lie to me

one tear caught on a trembling eyelash*
    In those, I am survived by my softness

I know I will live
As long as I can write
And writing is pretty easy
I could write all night...

Fear is engraved into my bones, trembling at your touch is built into my system. But these days I don’t know why I’m shaking. These days I feel like I’m constantly holding together my paper machete heart with glue that doesn’t stick. With love that doesn’t feel right. I wake up tasting your blood more often than I fall asleep remembering the way you made me feel. I have never been so heartbroken I was afraid to look it in its eyes. I suppose I did this to myself. I was fourteen years old painting my blue eyed addiction to look like love. But love doesn’t look like that. Love doesn’t feel like that. And now I’m eighteen and I know that
I felt it when you touched me, and I am so scared to be touched again because I know it won’t feel the same.
They think it was the rough hands from six years ago that makes my bones ache but it is the memory of you in my room, stroking my hair and pretending like you loved me. It is you holding me on the night my life fell apart. It is me in your car holding your hand and wondering how bad it’d hurt when you let go. It is the mess you made of me, and the days I’m too afraid to ask myself what’s wrong. A heartbreak so painful it can bend your bones out of shape until the only thing left of your ectoskelton is a shadow of what you once were. When your screaming turns into an echo but you don’t remember the day you started biting your tongue . And you start to wonder when you stopped taking off your ring before you got in the shower. When you stopped saying I love you before hanging up the phone.

And when it all falls through the ceiling and all that’s left to do is sit in your broken home,
you’ll remember

you saw the walls crack weeks ago.

I have walked through fire
to reach you

and the blisters on my feet
are love bites

from a distant love