lived experiences they call them, as though unlived experiences could be any more or less damaging than what reality inflicts individually.

poems i will not write for you:

clean lines of even length that stripmine my trauma out of my blood

half-beaten verses throbbing for your gaze: look at my gaping wound, my festering sore, the apartment where i was raped, the doctor who gave me an abortion, the shower were i stayed with all my clothes on for hours on a day when no one could see me 

i will not write a polemic that yanks your heart into the street where my friend was shot, in the gutter, and his blood followed the same concrete rivulets that the rain does there to this day

i will not write you a single word for every dear heart gone for a salt grain of addiction, one chemical too far over the line of appeasing aching bodies and brains, for being one breath too close to peace we have lost you each forever

i will not write you a holy verse for the part of my heart who committed suicide on the steps of the ohio statehouse when his weight was too much to carry, god does give us more than we can bear, there is no god, he deserved so much better.

i will not chart and rhyme the million times i have been catcalled, followed, harassed, bullied, drugged, shoved, slapped, spat on. 

i will not even document all you cannot see: the harms you have inflicted by not witnessing all of what is physically evident in my life: the slights, pauses, turning aways, all the slow afternoons cracking the earth and my body open by ignoring 

not me but others, not others but all of us, but none of us. complacency strips you of dignity entirely.