Before I left to walk to your music show in the courtyard,
I slipped the knife my boyfriend gave me into my dress pocket.
It was heavy enough to weigh down half the outfit, and
radiated something putrid or dissonant in that crowd
of flowers and sandals and paint and honey-chamomile
for the entire duration, but
I needed a reminder of who I am now.

Being near you at all was already a betrayal of myself
because now I guess I'm playing his type: the ******* girl--
the stereotype-smasher-badass-***** girl--
calling her a "girl" isn't even fair
because she chopped enough of her hair
to be Wyoming's worst "******" nightmare,
and she wears work boots and flannels and scars,
(and sweatshirts to cover my secret scrawny arms--)
She’s a piece-of-machinery girl,
a rachet-and-wrenched-myself-together girl,

and it took so ******* long for me to forge a metal exoskeleton
hard enough to smother this stupid gushy heart.

Because a heart only compromises the real **** I have to do in the real world--
not your fantasy world where no one has a job but
slurping your excess passion alone is somehow enough to sustain, and
the men sweep bundles of wild violets-- shooting straight out of the New York City pavement--
into their hands as gifts, and
their women smile and flip their Pantene-commercial hair in slow-motion, and
together the lovers paint poetry onto each other's chests in the dark, and
your long-expired promise of that love-- of your dream--
that you had me believing
still plunges deeper into my stomach than I ever planned it to and it feels like a white-hot
knife splitting me open from throat to bladder--

You came out to hug me when the show ended.
I walked home crying a hydraulic expulsion of the final remnants
of my old, foreclosed heart.
Then he was right there waiting for me at home, and it was so easy
to pretend.