A while back I was the girl in an abusive relationship. Physically he never hit me, but the emotional scars left on me were utterly damaging to my self-worth and made it almost impossible to love again.

Last year I took a poetry class because I have always loved to write poetry, and I wrote this poem one day when I was reminiscing about the past. And, while this poem may not be exactly what I went through, it does ring true for a lot of women (and men). I want to raise awareness of domestic violence through my poems, and I hope if you are currently going through something like this, that this poem helps you see that it can only end one way unless you get out now. Here it is:

"What We Refuse To Talk About When We Talk About Love"

It’s a pocket full of December,

or how the sky looks immediately after a storm.

The world outside is covered in knives,

and it’s a week old bruise

where the skin hasn’t recovered from the abuse.

My hands still shake and shudder at the sight.

The feeling of whiskey searing down my throat

is a pathetic attempt at forgetting just one more time.

Say you love me like it will kill you if you don’t

because feel like I’m mourning something I have not yet lost.

When I wander in graveyards,

it’s the color of broken headstones.

Silly girl, don’t you know that once he’s gone

you can’t resurrect the person he used to be.

I memorized how the word sorry looks when it spills out of his lips

as he grabs me by the hair again tonight.

Thrown into the wall once more and the house winces

at the force of love I always knew.

Only this time instead of waking up to an empty shell of a home

broken glass and tears on the carpet

there was only black and blood.