LOVE Poem: You’re a match and I’m still gasoline, in five acts, by Maia Brown-Jackson

I.
You crawled into my heart and made a nest,
lapping at the blood around my mouth
and gently kissing the bruises mottling my skin.

Maybe I could be good at this, I whisper,
but I keep it so quiet that you can’t hear
and hold me to it.

I know I’m going to fall hard.
I just hope you’ll hold
my hand on the way down.

II.
I think the wound that is my soul
may be too covered in scar tissue
for me to go back to
girl-that-was,
girl-that-I-miss.

I think my heart might be too young.
I spent so many years
breaking and protecting and building walls
that now,
now that I’m finally learning to feel,
my heart is like a child
still learning—

III.
Something has changed.

I feel like all I do is feel
with all my broken pieces
and the black holes between them.
in the secret place inside my head.

All I want is love, and love,
and love,
and still I run from it, fast and sloppy.

Does that make me a monster?
Does that make me profane?
Does that make me human?

I feel like all I do is say
yes,
and yes,
and yes,
please,
take what you will, and more still,
only the words never make it past my throat.

IV.
Here are my carotid and my aortic and my femoral.
Here is my neck, I say,
Yes, I am here to breathe for you
because I don’t care what you do
if afterwards you make my body a shrine
because, surprisingly, I trust you.

For so long I’ve shown less than an ember,
a coal,
with barely enough oxygen to continue to burn,
and I know you wondered
if I wanted, too,
and
with you
I think, maybe, I do.

V.
You crawled into my heart and made a nest,
lapping at the blood around my mouth
and gently kissing the bruises mottling my skin.

I love you, I say, and take your hand,
ignoring the punch to my gut and
the collapsing of my lungs because no one
ever told me when I was young—

Maybe you don’t have to
sacrifice your beating heart whole
and bloody, wrenched from your chest,
maybe you can just offer its care to someone
who might treat it with gentleness.