I.

​

i know you are not always ready to give
and receive
loving / like healing
is a practice / continuous / non-linear
you learned early how to love
dysfunctional / disorganized / demeaned

​

you were taught to offer love / as collateral
trauma as a transactional element / inherited
from a lineage
of volatile / habitual women

​

you will be 24 years old when your mother recalls
being raped
she tells you casually / over brunch
as if it was not an ordinary day to begin with
tells you about the knife in the door
that failed to lock

the asphyxiation of memory
while you spread marmalade on your toast
contemplate hunger

of brutalized women

you have learned to construct desire
as more than an ideal / coerced from birth
to be the sacrificial lamb
at the altar / of femininity  
of lovers who dulled their sharp / edges
on your body and called it radical / called it
tenderness / accidental

​

your love as more than the words / weaponized
by those who only sought to consume you / spit you
out in shards
and claim you bloodied their mouth

your love as [w]hol[l]y / rooted in the soil
in community / in bone
the mythology of survival

​

II.

​

i know some days your love / is a harbinger
of snarls / and teeth
of strangers pining for intimacy / on vibrant screens
gut filled with hibiscus
for virtual rituals / of heaven bound modernity

​

these ephemeral longings
of the timid / the ravenous
this love that congregates / in your belly
that bellows / stakes claim

nourish it / and let the flesh ripen
love for your self can look like redemption  
but it can also look like rage
let it move you to action either way

​

until your love no longer recoils
but demands / sanctuary
honoured boundaries
afternoon soft serve kisses
passionfruit syrup sticky between fingers
to be dizzy with moscato
and glittering / in the passenger seat

​

until your love
rewrites the narrative
as the omen / the great ceremony