Newton's laws of motion
you said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would've been fine / and that made me want to die
I.
give me your wrung out rag of a heart
that slick and sodden offering
here we lie in violent flux you can’t repair
your suffering odes still mimic mine
an inescapable former lover chained to the roof where you wanted me
years pass and i’ve remained inert
with my prickling, stagnant choices sown
standing before the vast unknown
lit by cheap perfume and cowed before the simple truth
standing over the city with my arms stretched out to god like some kind of martyr
like it was a rite of passage instead of a few nights with my knees curled into my throat
you know that your name still echoes in my mind
and i think of you when the hummingbird flies
i still check the back of my hand as if it’s a clementine splitting rotten at the seams
don’t you see what you did to me?
your youth, however humid, can’t exhume you.
II.
the years come and they slide away and they just don’t stop.
i am sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool and you know how that feels, copycat poet
choked by chlorine drawing the same images over and over
still blue, still bold, not getting better.
i wouldn’t let anyone bind my wounds
so i bled until the water sloshed over the docks
my fear’s thrummed beneath my skin like a drummer’s last stand
since i met you and i learned what those emergency plans they made us draw in elementary school were for
you made me diagram being left: the type of poetry, the flavor of comfort,
the vicious throbbing sobs on the train.
head down in a physics classroom after the fact
force equals mass times acceleration equals
you shoving my body across the room
and watching me shatter against the wall.
III.
i wanted to be wanted so badly it was like a physical ache
exposed muscle and raw beating pulse
bounding bones collapsed into a trick of light, some sleight of hand,
because you wanted me and i wanted to be wanted more than anything in the world.
you let me sit in the backseat of your cherry-red convertible
with your hand up my shirt and your teeth against my throat.
i wanted to be wanted so badly
would it have changed anything if i had wanted you at all?
if i hadn’t had blood streaked around my mouth
because it felt like cannibalism, a kind of self-immolation, to be wanted by you
when you were older and wiser and nothing like me at all.
my breath caught in my chest on the freeway with my arms in the air
as we surmounted the great american novel;
for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction so i watched you crash the car
as your hand burned prints underneath my shirt
the lemonade in my mouth drew sour.
i want to skip town on my own now,
each syllable of lolita makes me wince,
and i watch myself chase you
without knowing how to stop
until you hung me out to drown, out to dry
with all this grief, fourteen forever in the
blazing light on your mother’s front porch.
equal and opposite reaction—
take your heart back.