TRIGGER WARNING


I lay awake at night, reflecting on the way your lips feel on mine,
but like a reflex I compare them to the many pairs I’ve felt in many places, how some lingered over my goosebumps, maybe to try and turn that feelinginto lyrics, I don’t know, while others bruised and pushed, too starved of faded
love pangs that the only pleasure was to fill *something—
But one pair tugged and burned across the delicate paleness of parts not meant for him, stinging red from fingers that squeezed with fight and pulled with rage and scratched with a greed that blocked any thread of humanity from a woman’s fear.
His arms created no protective cage around me because he never desired to have me but to hold and pry my legs to take a barely blossomed womanhood waiting for that boy on that bed listening to that song
but teeth bit into my flesh offering no promise of soft, loving nips meant to excite the blood that should have flowed sweetly through my heart instead of pumping so hard it drowned
out my broken no’s as they quieted and died.
I noticed how his lungs labored with power as he finally burdened me,
shamed me with his need, but I realized later even if his eyes had locked with mine, nothing of his liveliness, nothing of his friendship would have lingered there. Going home, the jeep clanked and wheezed, sounding as used as my folds felt—but then he told me,
“I gotta fix that”
The dark corner of my mind rasped that he didn’t mean the tears of my skin or the abandoned pieces of my trust, never to be molded together again, not even by you.