9th grade lover
When I was 14 and more tender-hearted than not
You served my first fear on a silver platter.
I didn’t know how to handle small smiles constant touches
I didn’t understand the language you were speaking.
I didn’t know you had my heart until you traced your fingers on it,
Slow, beating as I watched from afar.
And then I understood, and the blood moved faster
Coating your fingertips with sticky, wet infatuation
Until you dropped it, from a boy’s hand
Blinking in muddled confusion.
And now, no longer a boy, I see
You navigate the fields of seeds I did not sow.
You take a hand of my closest friend,
And whirl her until she gets all giggly.
Cheeks flushed with happiness, she comes to me
Spinning cotton- candy and spitting sugar
Floating on “pink ballet slippers” above the air.
I itch to tell her about the cavities
That gravity works in one way or another
That she will bleed out as I did.
But I keep my tongue against my cheek.
My warnings are as much for me as they are for her,
I never really let you go.