The Violence of Verse 

At fourteen I shattered myself in hopes my reflection could be tamed to my first girlfriend’s favor. I sliced the saccharine skin of her throat hoping the warmth she bled could mold me into something she wouldn’t choke on. But in the end, the fractions of disposition I was left with were too sharp and I still cut her; as she did me. The hurt she’d struck me with bore my first full poem in a little red moleskin notebook I kept by my bedside. I used the simmering pages of pen frantically chiseled into white hickory to fuel my love of writing as I watched it kindle and flicker in the gut of my father’s fireplace. 

At fifteen and sixteen my heart had no room for the love I’d confined behind this glass body. I wrote in cryptics and uncertainties hoping someone would put in the effort to decipher the pulps of poetry rotting between my teeth. I appreciated the warmth during brief embraces from people I felt understood me- to this day I believe pain is translatable, and I’ve always liked being too close to hot fires on cold nights. So, when they broke my jaw apart, taking the flesh of my nouns and the spices of my adjectives, I fell victim to the wake of lovers and ‘friends’ who’d only read my writing to leave once more. They felt overwhelmed, maybe intimidated by how deeply everything affected me, and I found myself gutted waiting for someone to read my work without such sterile dissection.  

At seventeen I was tired of hearing my father preach about Woman being created from Man’s rib. I took a knife to my own in an attempt to rid myself of the fact I was born from a man who only knew how to hurt. Of course I didn’t actually do that; once more torment turned to paper’s enfold, and I wrote hymns about his neglect. I taught myself that man’s love is always measured by the amount of violence he’s willing to inflict; and that woman’s love is measured by how much violence she can excuse.  

At eighteen I grabbed at my blanket and pretended each fold of fabric was a fragile hand soothing itself over my own- but it was soft, never holding back no matter how tightly my clammy fingers knit themselves into tethered cotton bound with the intent to comfort. I wrote about wishing it would hold me the same, or regard me at all; but instead, the clay of my fingers on my left-hand would mush themselves into pink wool; my right-hand guiding pen into the tear-stained paper of my notebook. My blanket was an unrelenting reminder that I’d break under any intimacy, and my poetry reassured me that I’d fall apart at the fragrance of the idea I’d be held back.  

At nineteen I saw it there, on the sheet of a lover’s bed- a sinking mark left from another woman. At nineteen, I let it be my coffin. It wouldn’t have fit right around my body- the sunken sheets had cradled a taller, broader figure- but I once let it be the death of me all the same. I wrote about it like a stabbing, like once-upon-a-time I was seen. The memories he left me with were bandaged by grieving poems that couldn’t remedy such deep wounds. If the next day you’d pried open my chest and ripped ribs from rind, you’d cradle your hands around withered lungs stained, suffocated, by pools of blue ink. You’d find them failing to thrive away from my father’s violence married to my mother’s excuses that reflected my own; my heart since left a victim of their carnage, of a cheater’s, and now of yours.  

Now twenty-one, I’ve spent my heartbeats translating trauma to poetry in this desperate endeavor where love has tied me to its post and forced me to write. Forced me to believe it will all come to fruition; every sentence a testimony that I am capable of being understood without intent of dissection.  

If even one of my poems can help us understand one another’s adversities, it’ll have been proof that suffering has worth when you grow from the pit of its decay. I will no longer feel confined to a throat, a rotting marriage, or a bed- just the whims of where a pencil can take me.