Calculating love in waves of pain
When I’m little
I paint a broken family with crayons
The father has blood in his hands
The mother blinded
And I am crying
Small in the corner of the white paper
The form of a hand against my cheek
When the teacher asks,
I just tilt my head and say
The child is scared
The mother doesn’t see
And He has blood in his hands
My teacher nods and
Takes my family away
I think about asking for it back
So I can paint a pair of closed eyes
Over their heads.
As I grow older
I start to write
Many pieces kept behind
Worthlessness Written
in different inks
Different voices
Different calligraphies
For some reason,
the one that stands out
it’s written bleeding red.
I win a prize for a story
Where a girl falls in love with a boy
But he dies
And I have never been in love
Not with a boy
Or with a girl
But I for some reason know
How grief feels like.
They tell us to present something in class
I write about child abuse and no one asks
when another kid pushes me down the stairs,
For a few seconds,
I let myself look up at the sky and not see.
I say my father threatened to kill me
My friends ask me what I did wrong
My mother says he was joking
I say who jokes with a hand around a kids neck
And she says my father loves me
I think maybe, love and pain are the same
Sickeningly correlated
As they break and fix
Head against the wall
Knees to the cold asphalt at school
Maybe love and grief were the same too
And the story of the dead boy
And mourning girl made sense after all.
I write again,
This time about a teen that in a corner cries
A father with blood pouring down his hands
And a mother that griefs and loves with eyes closed.