I know you didn't believe me
when I said the water stains in my books
were from reading in the bath,
but I also know
that you had no idea
I wasn't weeping
over the soft words of Nabokov.
If only you could have seen it:
hot angry searing saltwater,
boiling over
and spilling out onto inky sheets,
so different
from regular tears:
how they seep into the paper greedily,
eating the words up,
bleeding carbon-black.
I know girls are supposed to be gentle
and kind
and soft
and I’m sorry.
I can’t help it:
the way people chew food
makes me want to burn everything down
and when someone asks me to repeat my question,
my chest burns and I spit out hornets.
I’m sorry,
and I’m sorry that being
sorry makes me angry too.
I fucking wish I could fucking say
that when I fucking broke my desk
or kicked my fucking closet door in
or fucking beat my fucking knuckles blue
that it felt better, that it left
and didn’t come back, but instead
it’s the people that leave
and the anger that stays.
We are all three-quarters water,
and I can feel myself boiling.
It's like an itchy red sweater
that’s two sizes too small,
something my brother
handed down to me
and my father
handed down to him.
I tried; I always do.
But then we always ended up arguing
about something stupid and I
felt my knuckles
turn white
and I felt it,
I felt it and I hated it and
I hated that I hated it
and I lost it and I saw it in your eyes,
just like I saw it in everyone else’s,
like they were watching the eye of a storm,
like they were realizing why hurricanes
have human names.
You fumbled over my body in the dark:
a driver looking for the brakes,
coming up empty
right before the collision.
I think of the way
your heart
was covered in oil-stains
from being touched so much,
and how I never understood how
you managed to not set it on fire:
mine is covered in steel
and still rusts like iron.
Sometimes I wish I could make a pearl,
just how oysters do it
out of the toxins in the ocean
that seep through their shells,
except I would make it
out of how much I fucking hate everything
so it wouldn’t poison me anymore,
so I would have something to show
for all this blackness inside of me,
so I could spit it out on your doorstep and say,
“There.”
