Growing pains

damned from the start

i spent a lot of my childhood
sitting in lawyer’s offices
and police stations
as my parents fought to
never have to see each other again
and i was taught that
to love is to constantly be at
war, even in the end.​

part of me will always think
i am on a battlefield,
it was bred into my DNA
that there is always a
battle to be won, a fight to
come out victorious from.
sometimes i wonder if
any of it made a difference;
i think i was damned from the start.
there was no other way for me to be:
i was birthed while the moon
was in chaos and i will die when
the stars combust.

i might have been a child back then
but i am still a little girl that doesn’t
know better, who is always at war with herself.

a poem about love

i want to write a poem about love, or maybe about the
loss of it. i tell myself it will be sweet and pure, like
honey dripping down my chin on a midsummer’s night,
while we sit on your father’s back porch and watch the
sunset. i want to write about the feeling, that feeling,
when they tell you they love you for the first time. the
way your heart heats up as hot as the sun and beats in
your chest as if to whisper, i am home. i have made a
home out of you. maybe i will write about how the
world seems to get a bit brighter, and feel a little
warmer when you’re in love’s embrace. i am not a
fool—i know i had a life before love, and cruelly, i will
have one after it, but that does not stop me from
wanting to exist only within. i want to write a poem
about love even though i have spent the last couple
weeks a little bit less myself because of it. even though
the world is back to being a fraction duller, and a little
bit colder. i want to write about love pretending like it
doesn’t leave you gasping for air on quiet little side
streets, listening to Christmas music sail over from
neighbouring cafes. pretend like it doesn’t turn nice
boys into grim reapers, collecting the soul of who you
were while you were with them. maybe i should tell you
how it is. that it is not always as sweet as honey. that
you’ll never return to that back porch and watch the
sunset in their arms. as sad as that fact is, you’ll always
have the memory of it. it is easier to lie to myself about
love than it is to lie to the world. they say the poets
know best, that they break their own hearts for art but i
would have stopped writing all together if you told me
the love would stick around forever. maybe that is the
part of love that you cannot outrun, no matter if you
are a veteran or not. you cannot escape the way it
consumes you, the way it fills you up until you look in
the mirror and wonder who is looking back at you.

i want to write a poem about love, and i am sure that
one day i will, because if there is one lesson i have
learned, it is that it never truly fades away. the sun stills
sets on that back porch. we are just no longer there to
watch it.

growing pains

i am 13, all limbs
standing on bambi legs,
always wobbling, never stable.
frail bones hold me up; i feel like
i can almost touch the sky.
my mother watches movies with me
every friday night and i’m still small enough
to fit into the cupboard under the sink.
​i am 23 and my limbs ache
from running and crashing
and drowning under the weight
of it all. i am so full of other people
that i’m no longer hungry.
i feel the heaviness of mortality
and what it means to be a woman,
to lay your own body down
in the early hours of the morning
for someone else to hold,
to love and be loved and
then forgotten.
i am 23 and i am all limbs
and empty promises and hope
and fear and longing.