Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone
until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either
so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear
and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it
another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes
I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you
to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.  

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure
you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even
soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?
I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look
at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved
it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,
I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how
I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise
to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.
Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?
I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands
carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands
because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation
to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire
before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered
before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

Throw scissors at it. 
Fill it with straw 
and set it on fire, or set it 
off for the colonies with only 
some books and dinner-
plates and a stuffed bear 
named Friend Bear for me 
to lose in New Jersey. 
Did I say me? Things 
have been getting
less and less hypothetical 
since I unhitched myself 
from your bedpost. Everyone 
I love is too modern 
to be caught
grieving. In order 
to be consumed 
first you need to be consumable, 
but there is not a single 
part of you I could fit 
in my mouth. In a dream
I pull back your foreskin
and reveal a fat vase 
stuffed with crow 
feathers. This seems a faithful
translation of the real thing. Another 
way to harm something is to 
melt its fusebox, 
make it learn to live
in the dark. I still want
to suck the bones out 
from your hands,
plant them like the seeds
we found in an antique 
textbook, though those 
never sprouted and may not 
have even been seeds. 
When I was a sailor I found 
a sunken ziggurat, spent 
weeks diving through room 
after room discovering
this or that sacred 
shroud. One way to bury
something is to bury it 
forever. When I was water
you poured me out
over the dirt.  

At the funeral, his other former girlfriend gives the eulogy. I sit in the pew.

Sitting in front of me, and behind me, and also to both sides, are more other former girlfriends.

Something heartfelt shared by Ex on the Mic sets off a chorus of sniffles among the Exes in Rows. They tuck their hair behind their little ears.

There are so many different people to hate, so I keep things simple and hate everyone.

I know why he picked me, a novelty.

I wore Mary Janes and high-neck dresses and labeled the shelves “Tuna and Nuts” and “Breakfast Items, Soup.” My hair was always squeaky clean.

Now I am someone entirely new.

A black dog, a broken heart.

I revel in being more like him now.

At home, I put on my sunglasses and turn off the lights.

Sitting on the toilet where light can’t peek through, I pretend the plunger’s a white cane. My chin held too high and to the side, I run through gruesome imitations of anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, surprise.

The world will be unsettled.

I will unsettle them.

Boys do not kiss boys. They catch frogs.
Is what I told myself the second it happened.

& there we were, hidden in the hemlocks of a secret swamp.
Your lips drifting away from mine like a silent ship

leaving harbor. Gone, as quickly as it came. I watched the shame
leap into the pond of your face. O the ripples.

How good we were at turning moments into paper,
into things we could crumple up & throw away.

You grabbed the frog squirming in my palms
& headed to the “cave,” to the crack between the rocks,

where the black & white striped garter snake
slithered into shade. How I wish I could say

that I stopped you, that I didn’t watch unhinged jaws
spring out like lightning, wrap around that poor

& unsuspecting frog, but I did.
Still too young to believe it, I wanted to see it

gone, eaten, that green & slippery part of myself
buried in the belly of a beast.

as a child, i learned
while killing, do not think about being killed.

            when you are five, you will watch your father,
            while skinning a deer, rip the hide from the muscle
            like pulling apart the velcro on your pink light-up sneakers
            after you get home from your first day of kindergarten.

as a child, i learned
the right body can be resurrected to walk on water.

            it is the summer after second grade and
            insects you will never learn the name of float on top of the river,
            and you watch as they glide and you hold your breath.

            just trust the water, they said.
            trust you will float, and you will float.

            you were always a child that sank.

as a child, i learned
when a rabbit dies, it will scream so loud
you will think of this death-sound with every other death after.
even the quiet ones, as if this loudness could out-wail death,
as if there is no other option but to break open the air
with your grief the same way your father cracked apart the
deer’s ribs to pull its heart out.

            you have never eaten another animal’s heart,
            but you watch your father cut the bottom third off with a pocket knife
            and skewer it along a stick he finds by the edge of the woods.

            when it emerges, gleaming and slick from the smoke of the fire,
            dripping with grease and blood-fat,
            you smell this heart-third
            and even though you can still see your father’s hands
            red and pulped and trembling
            as he pulls out the center of this creature,
            you can’t help but notice your mouth water.

now, you think of which parts of yourself
you will slice off to make a meal from,
how you can rip your girlhood off you
with nothing but the right pair of hands,
which parts you could snap the blood vessels from,
easy as pulling out a weed,
all your good blood shaken loose like so much dirt.

            so consider this a window,
            consider the surgeon a precise and humble butcher,
            who fills the future with your own blood,
            which is, after all,
            the only water you’ve ever found safe enough to trust,
to close your eyes in,
and float.

My mother swapped prayer for sharp screams when my
sister crowned. The epidural settled
on one side until the nerves in her left
hip became stars, dying down the dark of
her thigh. At 17, I watched a girl-
child emerge covered in only-God-can-
name. Maybe, blood-light. Star-vein. Water-
sky. A boneless sea creature who knows some-
thing about the universe sitting next
to ours. I don’t want to go back nor do
I want to die this way—making daughters.
My body has a tenure of chaos
and blood. It’s clotting and ache began at
the edge of girlhood. I see no way out.