Maritime

What constitutes love? My mother slides the newborn thickness of 

my skin right off with her shaving razor, and transplants my unwound body into a dress, my bones drying out brittle & I look at love as something that exposes you, vulnerability disguising itself as a deep red. If I can be piles of muscle on the splintery cabin floor, I can also be the contained image of royalty, and I can be what I am supposed to be; a warm cup of black coffee, a dreamless sleep, the softness 

of satin, the written-out equation of what it means 

to be a girl. 

What constitutes love? When I grow up I am going to be: 

loved. I’m also going to be a big, big fire, and I’m going to be the one that it extinguishes it, my skin burning my skin burning up 

every unsightly part of me. So a firefighter, then. Or maybe I will be shallow water, with big, big teeth protruding from the pit-bottom of the lake. Either way, I consume. Is that realistic? You still 

haven’t answered my question: what constitutes love? 

My mother puts her prayer-hands 

around my neck, says she’ll make me holier. Is that love? If I can be loved, I can be innocent, my life fresh & my eyes fresh & my traumas 

iced over. The old skin floating down underneath the water & my purity building itself up bricked, flowing out of my dress, my unformed body, the fragmented parts 

of me unsightly, but we’re getting there, we’re moving with the current. We’re going to find love in the buckles of old shoes, we’re going to find love in the meat of the water’s 

body, or my body, or in the bodies of those I have loved. What constitutes love? Love is a monster of bodies, love looks like a little girl 

daydreaming of a world in which the sky is blue & God himself reaches out and cuts her hair off. A world in which she has transcended the limitations of a body & floods up the throats of the 

people who hurt her.