take a girl. take
all of her hurt, all of the nails piercing her hands, all
of the dead flowers taped to her skin. take her hair,
tree branches woven through and choppy bangs,
take her chest, how you can practically see her
heartbeat move the rest of her body. take her rib cage,
cracked open and tacked together, held up with fishing line
and guarded with rose bushes. take a girl who has never
been touched tenderly, who prepared for the storm so
vigorously she erased the calm that anticipates the rain.
take a girl with bugs in her brain, who can't help but
look like she's walked through hell barefoot, who
can't help but retrace her steps, who lusts after the heat
and overlooks the blackened char that coats her figure.
take a girl who runs, bolts at the first manifestation of desertion,
who obliterates the promises that lie in front of her just to
watch how easily they erupt. take a girl and call her "chaos"
because it is what she was birthed into and assembled from,
dark dirt packed into the crevices of her smile. take this girl and
give her to a boy. watch
him touch her gently, so gently it feels like he does not touch her
at all. so gently she wants him to ravage her.
give her to a boy that covers her face with his hands, clean hands
that he has scrubbed raw, clean hands that have learned gentle
through trial and error. give her to a boy that has always
done the leaving, he packs his things in the middle of the night
and only takes what he needs. the rest can stay. he is made
up of "look, don't touch," he is stone like marble with cracks running like stitches up his side. he has scars that cover his
clean hands, his arms, his chest, his back. take a girl and give
her to a boy, and watch her trace her fingers over his flesh gently,
so gently it makes him shiver,
so gently she wants to devastate him.
watch them interact like animals in the wild, people who have
grown with their fists up, people who have started from empty
and have learned what it takes to present entirety. watch them
tear each other apart without moving, eyes fixed on their
reserve, begging to know more without flinching.
watch them pull each other apart and fold the pieces around
in their palms, they stick every moment back into it's place,
gently, so gently that they want to rip what each other has
been wrongly taught into shreds, so gently that they want to
scrub what has stained them until it is clean. take a girl and
give her to a boy, let her kiss him so gently that they
want to do something stupid. so gently that they want to make
a mess of each other, so gently that they want to fall in love.