The fetal heart starts to quiver at eighteen
days gestation, and three days later it is pumping
blood ferociously in a closed circulatory system,
and I can’t pinpoint exactly when mine started to
break. My father says to stay off men with the same
austerity he would use if he were warning me
to stay off coke, or to put down the bottle. He
says he is tired of finding my heart on his dinner
plate, a cheap replacement to the steak he’d
rather be tearing into, and he says
his freezer is so full of the psyches
I took from the guilty parties that he has no room for food.
I tell him that it makes sense, then, that he has
gotten so thin, and hours later I am wrapping my
thighs around some beautiful boy’s neck, as if this
is the way to sustain any kind of meaningful
relationship, when he said “how YOU doin’?” to
the honest yearning muscle between my legs
before he ever looked into my eyes. I really wanted his tongue
osculating new phonemes into my lungs upon which
I could build the morphemes I haven’t yet articulated.
In reality, it’s easier to lie back and make eyes at
the peeling wallpaper in a stranger’s bedroom than
it is to hold a compelling conversation with someone
who says they care. I execute my role on
the stage that was built for me, because no one ever
gave me the tools with which to construct my own.
I used to wonder why people smoke after sex,
and everyone always said that it was because they
did it too hard, but I learned rather quickly that
it was because there’s really nothing to say to a
man who can’t look into your eyes, and the long
draws off of a cigarette give me more emotional
satisfaction than the shell of a human next to me
in bed ever could, when the only semi-useful words he
can muster are, “Damn, girl…you was built for fucking.”
My mother tells me that I am better than this; I am
better than strangers on street corners, and I am better
than torn up bar stools. I’ve demanded better, and all I got was
this t-shirt and a losing lotto ticket, along with the
attenuation that solitude leaves one with. My father
now dozes off during dinner. The thumping
of my heart against the ribcage of my bedroom walls
keeps him up at night; instead of engaging
in a strenuous search for someone who doesn’t
widen the crevices, I’ve learned to just leave that
trusting muscle behind instead of bringing it with
me to parties it had no business crashing in the first place,
because there isn’t room for three in bed once my hair
is fanned out across the pillows and I’ve reduced
myself to nothing more than a pile of limbs
in desperate need of untangling.
