There is a look that you used to get in your eyes which I cannot to this day quite accurately describe. It was the night prowler, passing by the downstairs window, peeking in. Evaluating the locks. Evaluating the distance between the front door and the valuables.

I made it so easy to get in. I kept the windows open, and my eyes shut. I kept the doors unlocked.

When you touched me, you went away. I was not a woman, I was the chemicals responding in your brain. Ironically, for a burglar, you hated any part of me which suggested that I was something of great value. You hated the individuality tattooed to my skin. What is a womans body if it does not look like the last woman's body you used to touch and go away from? You hated the reminder that we are not all the same, and we do not exist to release chemicals in your brain.

I colored my hair red. Like wine. Like the lipstick you said looked "too heavy." I inked roses into my ribcage and between my ******* and I kept you at a safe distance, that is to say, too far away to ever touch me again.

The windows are locked.
The doors are deadbolted.
I moved homes, I moved cities.
You'll never get close enough to give me that look;
You'll never taste wine, or feel the ends of my hair between your fingertips while we watch a movie.
You'll never trace the shapes of roses.

You

Will never see me

Again.

I am afraid of speaking.
I am afraid of the texture of my voice, and the effect it will have on you.
I don't want to be pressed into the caricature of an angry woman; voice raised in what they call a hysterical display of emotion.
Calm down. Be rational.

Stop being
So
Dramatic.

Well let me tell you something:
I am an angry woman.

Because all I can see is my best friend’s blonde head, coming within an inch of becoming the crushed drywall beneath his fist.
All I can see is the false piety painted on his pastor’s face, asking, “well… did he hit you?”

I see her eyes closed in the darkness, fingers gripped in the sheets he tore off of her body to wake her. She has to hold on to something.
He says, “Show me you're enjoying it.”


Calm down. Be rational.

Like he wasn't gaining access INTO her BODY by FORCE. Like, of course it's her job to lay down and take it. Like it. Lick his lips for the taste of honey, because honey, he told you to.

but it's poison. It enters her bloodstream, weakening her will to resist it.

She looks at her phone, at a text she did not compose herself, or send,
“Hey hot stuff. When you see this, let's have ***.
“If I pretend I didn't write this I'm just playing hard to get.”

Do you get it?

Yeah. I am an angry woman.

Stay calm, dear sister. Be rational.
Rationalize the gaslighting, because the big picture doesn't look beautiful when you hang it above the sofa; and her home was staged to look like a family so that when you look in the window, you don't see that she was a hostage.
You don't see that her son was asleep in the bed when he grabbed her face between his hands and crushed it,
And called it “gently redirecting her gaze.”

From the window, you can't see his body blocking the exit.
You can't see her baby, with his little fingers curled around her *******, begging for comfort.

I will not calm down. And in case you are so damaged by devotion to comfort that you can't see it, it is right to be angry.

It is righteous.

I am angry, and more rational than I have ever been in my entire life- rationally, righteously begging for justice to flow down like rivers.

I am an angry woman.

Bite down hard.
There can be no question of who’s in charge here.
There can be no doubt about the alpha- sheep.
Make sure you hit an artery; we can not allow that kind of blood to flow unbroken inside their veins- and remember that we are only trying to help them remember their place. Because we love them.
Stand back, and let the smell attract the vultures.
Let the laymen see-
EXCUSE ME EVERYONE, THERE HAS BEEN A BRUTALITY
And make sure you lick your teeth clean.
Make sure your breath smells like honey.

Strip them, strap them down, parade them through the public square, declaring,
LOOK AT WHAT THEY DID TO ME.

What a spectacle.  

Why can’t we all just make peace?

It is a wonder, to feel
Chemical peeling, remove the first three layers of dead, useless skin
And the new life was sleeping beneath it, isn't that always the way?
Raw, untouched, unloved by nature's oils,
Unfelt by the rough but gentle fingers of maternal hands
Steady my trembling, I cannot see the page when it moves like that.
Do not remove me from my grieving,
I need these little deaths;
It is right that I should lay down in their little graves and feel the weight of the earth scatter over them.
It is right that I should feel the sting, deep in the part of my nature which knows that the betrayal is always greeted with a kiss
I am the man who stands in outrage, and cuts the ear from the soldiers head,
And then turns in shock to roosters weeping,
And removes to the city's edge

Crawl on your belly into the garden,
Slip between the ferns
Swallow fallen fruit you found on the earth,
Fatten your girth with what you didn’t earn.

Crawl into his marriage bed,
Break into his children’s home;
Rearrange the furniture,
But it doesn’t make it your own.

You are not his wife.
You are not his lover.
You are the profane, no-name, acquisitive *****.

Crawl on your belly into his bed,
Sink your long teeth into his cowardly throat-
Rearrange the furniture,
But it doesn't make it your home.

His eyes are like black beetles rolled onto their backs, thick legs like lashes flickering in the movement it requires to take me in;
And I am exposed- again- to the disease they spread from living underneath the foundations of so many homes, not unknown, exactly, but pardoned as 'harmless’ and left
to live in the crawl spaces, where his real eyes roll between the cobwebs.

Therein the innocence of beauty, with all her God given curves, is curled up inside the belly of that glutton, and the stomach acid does the devil’s work in decomposing her;

We all have bruises on our necks, blooming in lavender colored thumbprints where he turned our faces forcibly away from him;
There is nothing so damning as a woman who has made eye contact with those insects,
Bite
Your
Tongue
Girl,

This is not about you.

This is about the ‘stumbling block’ you became to him,
This is about the disastrous eventuality of outliving your usefulness.
This is about the godforsaken body you were given to spite and entice him with,
And your ability to keep it carefully hidden.

We will not bite our tongues.
We are not the amalgamation of soft feminine lines, rent into the shapes you like them best,
Or the shapes you hate,
Or the constantly transforming flame of your carnality, with it's cruel hands around your throat.

We are not our bodies;
But they are ours.
We are not our bodies,
And we will not be easily devoured.

Your eyes flicker with warm light,
like the humbled cumbustion of a dying fire,
expiring under a cold sky.
Embers roll into black,
Dirt and ash,
and I am afraid of what’s left behind.

After all this time,
You grew to despise the love you claimed to seek.
After all this time,
You’ve still got the sharpest teeth.

Embers roll into black,
Dirt and ash,

And I am afraid of what’s left behind.