Hit me with your battlefield.
I want to hear about your battle scars—
The ones you won by being
So strong, so smart.
Tell me about the men you lost
To the other side, the ones
Who fell on their knees,
Asking for forgiveness.
Did you give it to them then?
Or did you smile your soft smile
And shake your head, tell them
“I never hurt you, you’re just
imagining it.”
Did you make them like me?

Tell me all the war stories,
And put your brass knuckles on
Before you hold my hand.
I want to leave your loving arms so scarred
That my family will not recognize me
At the morgue. It will take a
Full-scale investigation
For them
to find me.
They will never find me.

Don’t put your hands on my heart—
your heart. No, what I mean to say
is-- our hearts.
Don’t treat them so roughly, love
Is ice: it is fragile. Time will let you freeze and
freeze over again, but do not make the mistake
of putting so much weight on your chest.

Your ribs look right to collapse.
Your sternum isn’t made of
Atlas’s bones.
You cannot hold up this world alone.

We come from recruitment camps
So broken, we never learned how to love
Like real people. We learned it on
Military time. We learned it in
Cadence, steps one-two-three
No room for mistakes, no room
For experimentation, we told ourselves
That we were the narrow lines of thin boxes
That the world had drawn us up into.

And I want to believe with all my heart that you
Never meant to hurt me, that the fist
Was misunderstood against my jaw
that I startled you with my heartbeat,
with my breath.

But, darling, there’s something I have to tell you:
Bruises are galaxies,

There is too much inside of me
for one universe
or for your arms
to hold.