Sparks

I don’t write poems about him. He loved me. That isn’t always a good thing. The road to hell is paved with hard opinions, sleight-of-hand manipulation, and phone call, after phone call, after phone call, after phone call. It wasn’t right– being loved with a leash and a shock collar. But not every sand trap looks like one, and some people don’t know they’re bottomless pits, and he had the kind of hands Rome was built on, so I didn’t notice. Because they weren’t throwing hits. But he spun poison so thick you’d swear it was honey. I found a boy like a bad high; I lost days to that one. Whole years of my life I still define by the sound of his voice. So he loved me. And some days that word still looks like blackmail dressed up pretty. Never trust the boy who says he’ll kill himself when you leave him. There aren’t bruises for that kind of violence– no way to take pictures, to sayThis is what he did to me. There was a forest fire in his chest that I would never have the water to put out. So I held his hand and I burned with him. I thought that’s what lovers were supposed to do. Last year, I kissed a boy with the same name and it felt like returning to the scene of a crime: I was afraid to leave fingerprints. I was afraid that he would find me– jump from the throat of a boy whose hands were nothing like his and demand to know how I could ever be so heartless as to abandon him. He loved me. That isn’t always a good thing. I don’t write poems about him.

When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you, it is you who belongs to this land.

I love when people that have been through hell walk out of the flames carrying buckets of water for those still consumed by the fire.