snap peas in a cool broth

people get scared of the thirty seconds i snap and tell them that six or seven years, or twelve, of shitty attitude, entitlement specifically, has got to go. anytime i judge, i remind myself i can't possibly

except in cases of abuse and misogyny...i tell you, had virgin me known that any of the boys i cuddled were interested, saying yes to dating darryl wright would have changed my life, but i don't talk about the past i never had, but not one of them was openly misogynist. deaf white men seethe at the privilege hearing white men have. fatso, by the way, was one of the worst i've ever met, and the fakest. everybody knew he was basically hearing. choosing to devastate and eviscerate me as a hobby was not something he stumbled onto.

oh, from the very start he was like, "follow my arbitrary rules and you will never be hurt, because you write better poetry than i do, and never write stories or attempt that novel, since you're too shitty at understanding men to make a dime."

i know the face of evil, and the devil is companiable. need butter? his tongue is made of the stuff.

but his first kiss, well. I know it was from before. it was my first, too, my first consensual kiss.

i could sit across from floyd and laugh and chat, and lay out each flashback tarot

separate the men again, categorize each, rate his rapes and

extract

and frame

any happinesses

and they got their own armory

the sanguine

from the sanguinary

floyd was the gladiator

between me and the abbatoir

(and i wonder

my god, john-boy had a huge crush on me

i never had so much fun that year

as when i was with him

why do we shrink and expand when we do

i, i

because the time never would have been right

to turn, flushed, back

after he raped or hit me--

for all i knew)