I was your typical angsty teenager,
lust and recklessness personified
into a human body.

I never called myself a poet,
but I spent my days
writing to boys who never loved me
and parents who were never there.

I went through a photography phase.
I cut images from magazines,
women with stick-figure shapes
and too much makeup and sad eyes
that everyone seemed to love staring at.
I took pictures of people
when they weren’t looking,
found beauty in others
when I needed to find beauty in myself.

I went through a rebellious phase.
I shaved the side of my head
and dyed my hair blue, and then black.
I tattooed my skin and
pierced crazy places on my body.
I smiled at adults walking by
because they fell silent,
and I knew that they were judging me
but didn’t have the
courage to say anything.
I liked thinking that
I was braver and louder
and more confident at seventeen,
than these people were at sixty-four.

I snuck out and went
for long walks in the dark,
because the nighttime air
felt peaceful and still.
and when the world was fast asleep,
I could let go of my attitude.
for a few hours, I could feel calm
because nobody was watching.

I was walking home one night
with Molly in my bloodstream
and adrenaline in my bones
but I got trapped in my mind
somewhere along the way,
stuck floating in between
self-worship and self-loathing.

I ran away a few times,
usually ending up at my friends’ houses.
I drank from blue Solo cups
not knowing what I was drinking
and not caring enough to know
as long as it got me drunk enough
to dance all night
and not remember a single thing
the next morning.

I watched my best friend
sneak away, not so stealthily,
to go have ***
with boys twice her age.
I think she snuck away loudly
on purpose so that
we would all know  
she was capable of
getting boys to
pound her senseless.
I don’t think she was capable of
getting boys to love her
for more than her body,
but I don’t think she ever tried.

I fell in love,
or at least I thought I did.
I had my heart broken
and healed and broken again.
at one point, there was a boy
who taught me how to kiss,
and that the backseats of cars
are rarely as spacious as they look.

through our conversations,
I learned that this boy believed
in extraterrestrial life,
and that he hated the color orange
for reasons he could not explain,
and that when he imagined the future,
he saw me in it.

through my own heartbreak,
I learned that sometimes
words mean nothing,
and that people can lie,
and that we were too young
to imagine any future at all.

I made memories
that still haunt me,
and promises that
I broke long ago.
I lived in the moment
and didn’t want to
think about growing up,
or what my plans would be
one year from then, or five, or ten.

I didn’t want to think
about anything farther away
than the weekend,
because nothing was guaranteed,
and nothing ever stayed the same.

change is constant
and, to me, that is both
beautiful and terrifying
at the same time.

my hands are in your hair
and your hands are around my neck,
and you’re choking me,
but I’m letting you choke me.
and it’s hard to explain
because I am not in control, you are.
but I am choosing to let you have control,
and that choice makes all the difference.
_________

my ****** did not listen
to my voice saying “no,”
but he did not take away
my ability to say “yes.”
I am a **** victim.
I am a woman who enjoys ***.
I am allowed to be both.
and if you can’t understand that,
you are part of the problem.

you told me once that
I have an old soul.
you were wrong.

I wish I had an old soul.
old souls are wise,
and kind, and helpful.
they contain beauty
that radiates
from the inside out.

no, I do not
have an old soul.
what I have is
an old mind,
packed with remnants
of the past that I
have tried my hardest
to forget.

how do you walk through
a mind like mine,
filled with fragile relics and
antiques that could easily fracture
if you aren’t careful?

how do you go on
without the fear of having
to pay for the damages
if anything shatters?

you tell your six year old daughter
all about stranger danger.

“don’t get into a car
with someone you don’t know.”

“don’t listen if they say
that they have a puppy
or candy or something fun.
they don’t.”

your six year old daughter
knows exactly what to do
if she is ever approached or touched
by a strange, unknown man.
but does she know what to do
if the man who touches her
has a seat at the Thanksgiving table?


you tell your thirteen year old daughter
that someone who she loves
should never hit her.

“if punches are thrown, leave.”

“use that can of pepper spray.”

“if you have to hit back,
aim for the eyes, or the groin,
or anywhere weak.”

“run away.”

your thirteen year old daughter
knows to never let a man hit her.
but if he yells at her,
and degrades her, and scares her,
and maybe even grabs her
but not quite hard enough
to leave a bruise, that is still abuse.
did you tell her that?
does she know what to do
if he doesn’t leave any marks
and tells her over and over again
that he’s sorry?


you tell your sixteen year old daughter
to yell “fire!” instead of “****!”

“people will care more
about the well-being
of their own property
than they will about your life.”

“they will come running,
but only if the situation
affects them too.”

your sixteen year old daughter
knows that people can be selfish,
and if they don’t want to see something,
they’ll simply turn the other way.
but there is good in this world too.
there are people who will care
and who will love her
and who she can trust.
did you tell her that?
if she stops believing in love
and genuine people,
does she know what to do?
or will she settle for the first man
who gives her any attention,
thinking that he is all
she will ever find?


you tell your twenty-four year old daughter
that one day, you hope
her future is beautiful.

“marry an amazing man.”

“have grandchildren.”

“live happily.”

when you tell her this,
you unintentionally add
your hope for her happiness
at the very end of your sentence,
almost like an afterthought.
your twenty-four year old daughter
wants to get married
and live in a nice house
and give you grandchildren.
but does she know to put herself first?
or will she marry a man because
she thinks he wants her to,
and have grandchildren
because she thinks that’s what you want?
does she know that
she has her own voice?
did you tell her that
she doesn’t need anyone
other than herself
to find happiness?

even as a kid, I knew that
forever didn’t exist.
I pulled tulips from the earth
and brought them home with me,
but I wasn’t looking at the petals.
I was looking at the tiny hole
left behind in the soil
after the roots were ripped out.

it wasn’t about the
beautiful thing I had taken;
it was about taking something
from the planet that had
taken everything from me.

the tulips went into a vase and
I kept them, like any other kid.
but I wasn’t the kid
who marched in and proudly
showed them to their parents.
I didn’t show them to anyone.
I sat by the vase and
watched them rot.

they were my physical proof
that death is real,
evidence that my friend’s dog
did not run away to a butterfly farm,
and the old man down the road
did not mysteriously go to a better place.
they died, and they rotted.

I think about this often now.
I killed flowers not to admire them,
but to prove to myself that
even beautiful things can die.

I know how morbid that sounds,
but what you have to understand
is that my whole life had
revolved around death.

my childhood memories
were a sickening collection
of wilted flowers, of worms
burned into the concrete
after a storm, of rotting fruit
and swarms of flies.

my young mind showed me
the same images on repeat.
dead friends, dead relatives,
people who left me,
people who left this earth.

for my entire childhood,
I never got to stop seeing
lives that weren’t fully lived.

even as a kid, death didn’t faze me.
violence was nothing to me.
pain wasn’t fun, but it was tolerable.
even back then, I was numb.

I remember how being
so numb at such a young age
terrified my teachers and
scared my friends’ parents.

I didn’t know how
to explain that I was numb
because no matter what
horrors I was shown,
I had already seen worse.

my first love was young rebellion
and how it made me feel.
my second love was abuse.

I have been asked,
on more than one occasion,
how I could fall in love with
a man who I was scared of.

my masochism was
inside of me for years
before I admitted to it.
I like to talk about how
I didn’t know that it was
wrong for him to hurt me,
but somewhere deep in the
back of my young mind,
I did know.
I realize that now.

I realize now that
maybe I enjoyed it.
maybe that was part of it,
my own fantasies leaking
through the cracks of my
innocent, good girl persona.
or maybe I truly believed
that his abuse was
all I deserved.

my childhood had taught me that
I broke everything that I touched.
I came from a broken household
with a broken family.
I broke both of my legs at one time,
and started the next school year
with two bright casts.
I broke toys that weren’t mine,
and ceramic dishes that
I threw down too hard,
and the hinges of every
bedroom door that I slammed shut.
I broke hearts, including my own.

when I fell in love,
I had finally met someone
with no conscience and
no concept of morality.

he was a sociopath,
a narcissist, an abuser.
he was the perfect
subject for my poetry,
and the perfect match
to my masochism.

I looked at him and wrote
that he was the diagnoses
that flooded the pages
of some therapist’s notes.
he was the embodiment
of the pain that he inflicted,
terrifying but somehow
too attractive to resist.

he was a love story
jotted down by a nihilist,
a black hole taking me
deeper and deeper.
he was a blank slate
that could not be
written over.

he was as empty as a bottle in
the hands of an alcoholic,
a freshly dug grave waiting
patiently for a body.

I worshipped him
like an absent father,
idolizing his image
as if I had only ever
known of his appearance
and normality and charm.
I acted as if I had no idea
that beneath the surface of his skin,
he was nothing more than
a living corpse.

if chaos theory is
as real as death, and
if I was never traumatized
and grew up happily,
I doubt that any of this
would have happened.
but it did.

whenever someone asks how
I could fall in love with
a man who I was scared of,
I tell them this.

I tell them that
I fell in love with him
because he was already
missing something inside.
his mind had glitched
somewhere in his past,
and then it failed to restart.
he did not feel emotions
the way that other people do.
I’m not sure if he could
feel anything at all.
he was already broken.

I fell in love with him
because he was the only thing
I had ever encountered that
I knew I couldn’t break.