Robbery
Love does not knock sweetly at the door
Not like a new neighbor with warm rolls piled into a woven basket left on the threshold of a bug screen door in early June,
It reaches its tentacles through the peephole
Seeps through the cracks in the walls
Smears its residue on the window frames and absorbs the chain locks stacked on the entrances-the world’s most dishonest ladders. This will lead to nothing I haven’t seen before.
Every time a new set of eyes introduces themselves to the grays in mine from across a crowded room,
I cannot seem to shake the grease from my hair, scrape the mire from under my fingernails, scrub away the filth that has burrowed itself in the places my skin creases to smile
Or with every passing second, I am someplace I have been before,
In the arms of the first boy that kissed me,
A childhood friend forcing my face to his in an unfinished basement.
Or in the passenger seat of my ride home’s car,
Primitive eyes wandering to my thighs
Barely fifteen.
Everything is a lesson.
Perhaps one day love will knock first
But you must understand
How it can be difficult to open doors for neighbors when your windows have only ever been shattered by baseball bats and bullets, and never by pebbles
When the only times anyone has ever entered have been break-ins
And my,
did they take so much.
