I wanted love letters and fireworks. I launched a boomerang into the cosmos, and it brought back the the taste of shame and the sound of bile rising in my esophagus. In the beginning, all you wanted to do was show me off, and I should have seen that I only existed in the ways that I could make you look good. You fired the gun, and implied consent became the bullet lodged in the curve of my hip, the scream that couldn’t escape from its shell. I learned that if I said yes once, I could never take it back, and in my naivete, this made sense, even if it was a type of sense that was painted with a thin layer of cognitive dissonance. In our wedding photos, you can see the despair in my eyes, and I felt as trapped as Barnum & Bailey’s tigers must feel. Circumstance issued me a set of blinders that recognized my need to survive, and I didn’t see the holes you were leaving from my peripheral vision. I didn’t know any better, and I don’t know if I can pin you to the metaphorical wall of culpability if the word “no” is still one I don’t know how to say. My eyes were my traffic lights, but that wasn’t enough. It will never be enough. You are the screams heard as a gun goes off, and I remembered the way you would slide your hands between my legs as I pretended to sleep, and prayed to every deity I knew that you weren’t feeling persistent. I feel broken. I learned to fake orgasms so you would go away, and I learned to stifle myself and walk on eggshells, in the hopes that I wouldn’t be insulted that day. I started feeling suffocated, and I carried my hurt on the outside of my jacket, but you either didn’t see it or didn’t care. On the rare occasion you could see it through the storm clouds and lightning, you told me I was hurt because I wanted to be hurt, that I was angry because it made me feel good, and if you came to bed like that, well, you must have wanted it. I was 24 years old and you were but a prison tattoo on my soul when I found out in a hotel in lower Chelsea that sex didn’t have to hurt, and that “please don’t do that” wasn’t always met with coercion tactics and the suffocation that came when you did what you wanted anyway. I watched my reflection on the ceiling as a beautiful boy wished me a happy birthday with his cock, and I hoped he could fuck me as hard as I hated myself. I became the smell of Newports and Jack Daniels, and you continued to be the lump in the back of my throat. The handcuffs you used to stifle me came off on the corner of Park and 42nd while my eyes shot daggers at passersby and a beautiful man with skin that reminded of chocolate with a voice like molasses and velvet told me I had the most beautiful smile. I refuse to believe that you ever knew what love was, because I’m still not as jaded as I should be. You tell me you have a woman, and you’re taking it slow out of respect for me. Respect is a word you don’t know the definition of; or if you do, it was never owed to me. I hope she is stronger than I was. I hope she has already learned to walk with a broken bottle in her hand. I still can’t have sex without the heat of whiskey burning in my cheeks. I still want love letters, and I want to be held as my body pulses with hurt that I can’t put a name to. I still feel like I need to atone for my existence. My laugh is filled with desire, and my eyes are now planets. If you stare into them for long enough, you can see Heaven, and I hope Heaven looks like the Dominican Republic and your voice doesn’t slam into me like a freight train and the holes you left in me don’t leave scars. Your hands are broken glass, and I am still pulling the shards out of my chest. I still don’t believe that I am beautiful, inside or out. I am not yet convinced that you weren’t just punishment for my not being good enough. I wish you had hit me, so I could have run and not be so wholly convinced that my body is an obscenity that I need to apologize for. I wonder if I was born to serve as a warning to others. When I have a daughter, I will teach her the word no, and how to unhook it from the sharp edges of her glottis. I will teach her how to love and let love in, and settle for nothing less than love. I will teach her to go in ready to fight and how to wage a war against not just the word, but the entire concept of abuse. I don’t want her entire life to be an extended lamentation. I don’t want her to be as tired as I am from not being able to forget how to sleep with her right eye open. I don’t want her to have all of these memories that she just wishes she could find a how-to guide on forgetting. I don’t want her footsteps to be to the beat of despair. I want her to know the things I still haven’t learned. I don’t want her lying awake at night, cursing the limitations of language for lacking a proper word for the anvil around her neck inscribed with the words “what do you call it, when you didn’t know that you were allowed to say no?”

Pretty girls don’t smoke, except when they do.
Confidence can be bought in a flip-top Newport
box and lit on fire, having even more of an
effect on your psyche than a brand new
pair of skintight jeans that you been
saving up for all month. He tells you to
holla at him next time you in the city, and you
give the side-eye to the boys hawking CDs on
the street corner, because the rap game is the
only hope for a way out they ever had, and you take
a long drag off that cigarette that always
been like a hand to hold in the moments of weakness,
and you squint your eyes like you thinking real
hard about what he has to say, and you got a train to
catch even though he asking you if you want to come back to
Brooklyn, and the second you grasp onto him press yourself
into the nape of his neck, all reason goes
out the window, so you miss the train so he can
spin you onto a bed in a brownstone on Flatbush Avenue,

and he’s like the heat of Johnnie Walker’s Blue Label
sliding down the back of your throat,
and two months later you sitting in the dark
corner of a bar in Union Square, waiting for
him, and he’s late, because that’s how he do,
and you trying to be angry, you really are,
but then he appears, without apology, because he
never apologizes, because his presence is the only
apology you ever needed and he tells you that you
not really angry, you just trying to be angry,
because you Scorpio women? You just like men. And
he’s so sure of himself, because he grew up
in the street, and he’s done his obligatory
eighteen months in Attica, and you don’t even
care because he’s so goddamn beautiful that
when you touch him, you feel like there might be a God,
and his hands on your hips are like little apologies
for all the times you been done dirty, except
he's going to do you the same.

He disappears off
the face of the planet, until he asking you to
“make arrangements” and you do, even
when he sends you a text intended for some other
bitch. And then there is blood, so much blood,
and it’s like the all the words you’ve
stuffed back down beneath your vocal cords are pouring
out all over him and he sits with you after,
so you let the remaining words stay deep inside, where
they belong, and you know you will never be in a dark room
with him again, where the only thing you can
see is the fragile transparence of your own skin.

Now it’s been three months and it’s about damn
time for his ass to pop up, because he's like a
motherfucking straggler, talking about getting
busy and losing track of time and girl, you always
knew he was busy, that he don’t have time for watching
the sun rise and set in your eyes, but you held out on
some artificial hope that…you don’t
even know what you were holding out hope for, do you?

And what kind of bitch were you anyway, thinking
you were anything special, thinking that he was
dropping a G on you because you were any
better any other bitch he could have crashed into
outside of Grand Central, but your anger abates
when you remember him covered in tattoos,
his body shining like you imagine the Pearly Gates
may shine. His voice keeps echoing in your ear, and there’s only
there's one thing that you really want to say:

“I need you to understand that I was emotionally
fragile, and I was at a very strange place in my life,
and you was a life raft that deflated under the
weight of my body, and I thought your hands on my
breasts could caulk up my broken heart which
had been sinking like the Titanic for years. Your hand prints
remain on the backs of my thighs, a permanent muscle
 ache, and I just want you to know that I
spent seventy five goddamn dollars on that underwear and
I’m still angry that you didn’t notice.”

When I haven’t been touched in a long time, I bump into strangers on the street so I can feel their proximal phalanges wrap around my bicep and triceps in apology, and I always pay cash so I can feel the bones in the cashier’s wrist slip away from mine, like sand through the cracks of a well-made boardwalk. I sit at an angle on the subway, so I can feel my thighs rubbing against someone’s right patella. I take phone numbers from strange men so I can feel their hand pressed against my lumbar vertebrae as they talk themselves up (or in), and tell me lies about how I am the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen; I tell them it’s all in my zygomatics and let it linger so that I know what it feels like when they move their hands down to the panniculis of my abdomen. I block the aisle at Duane Reade so you have to say excuse me, and feel my gluteus maximus as you intentionally press through. I have more strange men’s contact information than I could ever use in this lifetime. I won’t call, anyway; emotional availability is about as likely as riding next to Jesus Christ on the morning train. I tell myself that I ride you not because I love your cerebral cortex, but because of carnal desire and the way my thighs feel wrapped around the iliac crests of your hips, and I’ll never get over the way your mandible brushes against my inner thighs. When it’s over, your medulla oblongata keeps your breathing in perfect time with mine, and maybe God removed a lobe from our left lungs so that you could take my breath away. I let you see the way my mitral and triscuspid valves open and close for you, and I’m prepared for the sclerosis that comes when you’ll go; and you will go, because they always go. I could never stay or be stayed with, yet you’ve peeled me like an onion, and in the same way of that complex vegetable, you will cause my orbital sockets to fill with tears that I can’t hold back. I’m so tired of building walls around my heart, because they are getting so thick and there isn’t much more room left in my chest to allow the heaviness of concrete alongside the required room for breathing without cracking my ribs, and I can’t figure out which one is more important: normal sinus rhythm or blocking myself from a pain that the strongest of opioids does not yet know how to touch.