leftovers

october is domestic violence awareness month

i leaned over the table and pushed that knife through your flesh
               watched you struggle to control your tongue
               watched your hands cup the blood til it overflowed
               watched you bleed over leftovers

crimson river flows  
         puddles onto a cream rug


i wait for it to slow to a drip
wait for your eyes to beg for life
wait for your eyes to lose light

wait for your eyes to lose their hold on me

tick
tick
ti—


until your hand slices through the air like that knife should have sliced through your flesh and lands with a thunderous clap to the side of my cheek

                            you say my vacant eyes can’t realize when the man speaks
                            “where yo’ mind at…”

mappin' your death
i chart the ways i’ll send you to your mama
let her mourn her creation
this beast she inspired through trauma of her own
taught you with no words  
she found fault in my bruises  
                                                                                and not your hand
you watched her shrink herself before men
and i should do the same


                                  i do

i shrink
i bend
i roll…
myself into the smallest ball
in the corner
under the table i should have stabbed you at so you cannot reach me
i no longer question why i hide
what i did
why rage consumes you like wildfire

i want you dead beneath my feet
under the table you forced me to hide
stuff you within walls that carry holes made from parts of me being tossed
plaster sometimes still falls onto my head as i sit across the table i just stabbed you at


but this all head play
a scene behind vacant eyes that can't realize when the man speaks

the rug  cream
your body  untouched
your tongue  sharp
your hands  empty
no blood river flows through potatoes


except mine

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The way you never fully get over someone who would hold you as if your skin were oxygen and use those same hands to pull life from your throat. I used to look at survival as the end. “If I just get out. If I just survive this. I will be fine. Everything will be fine.”

Eventually I got out. And it wasn’t this act of bravery that I see in movies and read in books. I waited until he went to visit family in another state. I waited until it looked like he would stay for a while. Then…I called him and told him I couldn’t be with him anymore. Thousands of miles apart and it felt like he was across the street when I told him. Felt like his hands was still around my throat. My head hurt like it did when he threw me on top of our neighbors’ car. I touched my nose as if it bled again, just like that time he headbutt me in his friend’s living room. I can’t even tell you what made him angry enough to do that. I don’t remember any of the things that made him do what he did. And I feel like this is something to remember. I am supposed to remember that. But I don’t. He did it so much I lost track of what would set him off.

I only broke up with him because he left the state. What does that make me? Brave? Strong? Capable?

I broke up with him over the phone because he was states away and then I called the phone company and turned off his cell phone so he couldn’t call me.

“Survivor” at times feels as though it doesn’t apply to me. I definitely didn’t understand what the word meant. I am a survivor because of circumstance. A series of “lefts” allowed me to disentangle myself from his grasp. He left the state. Therefore, I left him. Had he not gone, what would have become of me? He would have swallowed me whole. I don’t even know that I would be here. Writing this piece. Sharing this part of me with the world during an awareness month dedicated to one of the horrific times of my life.

I didn’t understand what it meant to survive. I thought once I was “free,” I would be…free. They don’t tell you that survival is a process and something you work at every single day. He broke me down over time. He wore me out. He took the bright parts of me and twisted it within his fingers and ruined me.

And sitting in groups with other survivors, they will tell me that I am just as they are. A fighter. I don’t have the strength to argue with them. Nor do I actually want to. People can call you what they want but you respond to only what you care to.

Perhaps, I am a survivor. But surviving is a whole other beast.