here is a secret

I have a small boat--oar-less, unmanned, and marooned nowhere--tattooed on my arm because (and no matter what I tell you about it as a way to circumvent the real story, as a shortcut to evade the real story, remember this) one day, when I was struggling with a story whose words I found twisted in a bramble of unkind syntax and a thorny silence, I found I wanted to thrash myself into submission.

I can't listen to Pure Heroine (Lorde, 2013) without the assault of memory: my brother's second-hand car, the driver seat a pool of sweat, the smell of leather.

I knew myself to be a woman because my instincts towards violence trained  themselves against myself. My body is a wonderland of craters, trenches, patched and quilted over to look like a war zone.

Her mouth, really, a ring of muscles.

To tell my parents I want a year off of work to work on my graduate thesis, the year off after that to look for grants for my PhD

Man on the jeep with caterpillar scars as fat and thick, glossy like collagen lips.

I am attuned to the way bodies resonate with pain and some, even, will sing out in chorus: here, here, I am. 

Here is another secret: I do not trust you.