A 21-Step Guide to Self-Love
A 21-Step Guide to Self-Love
you broke my heart so you should give me yours
-Naomi Sharon
- filter the petrichor from the air
- sift the stillness from the arrival of rain
- leave its drops to patter against your roof
- behold the cuckoos preening their feathers by your window
- listen for the music your body makes with the whispers of the wind
- stretch the perforations on your thick skin wide enough to house your hands
- reach under your muscles and gather every bone you’ve wanted to pick with him
- trace the track of your tendons with your fingers
- pull them till they snap your body back into wakefulness
- demand for what once filled that chest with melodies
- ask for each finger that has reached to squeeze your wholeness,
- rearrange the Brandy albums that kept you awake when the whole world tasted death
- pluck out the metaphors etched in the little poems you squeezed into the crevices of his eyes
- request for the rabbit in the moon he promised to help you catch
- return the shadows he drowned in your darkness on nights only the stars smiled
- dissect his noise from your voice
- empty out the dessicated wings in your belly
- launder his sweat and promises and cologne and sap and hair and blood from your linen
- flatten out the tension he planted on the surface of your cheeks
- distill the tenderness you gifted him and inject it in your veins
- lie on your back and let the crimson in you flow again
