sharp objects

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

I think that love poems are really powerful when they’re written by people who aren’t in love. Almost as if to say:Look how much I can hurt without anyone’s help. Look how full of no one I can be without collapsing. This love poem is proof that I know how to carry a torch. This love poem is proof that I’ve had the dream with a king-sized bed in it. This love poem is screaming out an open window, is screaming into my pillow. I know what I’m capable of.

Show us on the doll where you were touched, they said. I said I don’t look like a doll, I look like a house. They said Show us on the house. Like this: two fingers in the jam jar. Like this: an elbow in the bathwater. Like this: a hand in the drawer.

–and what I really meant to say is, girls like us are fluent in silence. When we bite our tongues, we swallow the blood.

Lifetimes ago, poems ago, I wrote that you were the burned roots that had grown back. The rough remains of a girlhood that I ate rare and bloody, the pink of my teeth, my gums. You are a vine wild and clinging, relying on a woman gone tharn, mouth and eyes the same void. My voice in your ear is a recording, I do not wish to be other than I, and I will not cringe for you.

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral. And it’s relentless.

What they cannot understand is the anatomy of a manic girl breaking. No clean edges, no roads back. Only bloodspatter, leak, voltage. Sonic boom. Brushfire. Jail time. Every day, a glorious and appalling new way to burn down my own house.