Poppy Rosales

the age-old struggle of being a woman in love that still plagues the 21st century

let's take away my roots. let’s make me a
generic girl with a generic flower name and
maybe make a joke or two about that––
about how you “deflowered” me––
but here’s the real joke: i bled for you.
and i don’t mean my once monthly crimson river,
no, i mean i bled for you. cherry-popping;
take this beating, muscular, wasteland
with you, because everything it’s pumping
out is yours already, anyways. imagine me lying
in bed in my finest silk pajamas, loathing thorns
once mine. and i, being the generic girl i am,
left your apology letter tucked behind some cheap booze.
see as a child i kept a dreamcatcher dangling
over my sleeping body, but now, it’s this:
a dried bouquet hanging in my window to remind me
that everything can be taken away
somehow. i heard that aphrodite kept a tooth
from the boar that killed adonis in a jar on her nightstand,
that helen of troy divided her bed in two
and slept on the floor between them both.
that even my own mother, fraught with good intentions,
turns to could-have-been love stories before
drifting off. imagine that kind of womanhood:
the kind where you cling to the skeletons tucked in
besides you in order to, at last, rest.