you know why i call myself a poet? because when everything comes crashing down on me and i am left beneath the rubble, the only way for me to stay breathing is to write about it. to write about the way the sky looks a little more grey than usual, the way that my hands cannot stop shaking no matter how many times i clench them into fists because even as steady things, they tremble. and so i write about it. when the first boy i loved ripped out my heart and squeezed all of the blood out from it and made me watch my very own destruction, i wrote about it. i wrote about the way he made me feel on fire and i loved it, even though i was scared of the flames because my house burnt down when i was five i loved it because it made me feel like home and how ironic is it that that i too, was burnt to the ground that just like my house, the sense of home that he had given me was burnt to the ground and for months after, i was left scavenging in the rubble, seeing if there was anything worth salvaging and i had yet to realize that i was the very thing worth saving but i stepped on my old bones, stomped on my body, crunched everything underneath my feet because i wanted nothing to do with my very own self so i sat down one night and wrote about it until 3am every line marked by my pen was met with a single tear, as i filled the paper with ink, my cheeks were flooded it was an ocean trickling off my face and landing on the paper i have yet to understand what i wrote because it is all smudged and the only word i could ever make out was, “him.” and i guess that made sense because that’s all i could ever seem to write about anyways but i could never talk about him even to this day my voice gets quiet and my body goes numb when i talk about him because there’s so much pain behind his name that i tell everyone not to mention it and i shut down because it hurts too much to speak about it so i write about it instead. when my parents would fight, their booming voices were so loud that it rattled the walls of my house. when this happened, i would put my head down and recite my very own poems to calm the uneasiness in my head, to slow down the succession of bullets that were grazing my skin and making me bleed my dad begged my mother not to leave that night and then she slammed the door so hard that i thought for sure she’d never come back and so i wrote about it. about the way that the door sounded like thunder and her drunken slurs reminded me of lightning, so electric. when they hit you, you could feel electricity coursing through your veins. she had a thunderstorm tongue, she could speak beautifully but you never wanted to stand too close because you knew that you would get obliterated entirely. one day she came to me for help and i told her, “write about it.” she asked me why you’d do such a thing and i replied, “because what else are you supposed to do when the words you’re yearning to say won’t come out of your mouth because your throat is lined in barbwire fence and every single word stings? — you write about it, so the pain eases up.”