The knocking of my knees takes the shape of a bruise, and the color calls itself my pigeon-hearted shame.

When I am lonely, I press against it with the pad of my thumb and call the pain remembering.

I remember the first time that a man shoved a piece of himself into me without asking first for my permission,

How he pried me open wide enough for me to swallow myself and stepped away when I began to choke.

My jaw cracked loose as dry wishbone in November,

My mouth wires itself open when he tells me that girls are not made like this if they do not want to be touched.

I want to ask him what my guilt tastes like,

But I am afraid that he will say nothing and mean it.

I want to take the same breath and tell him that he has arrived late to the party,

That the room was already stripped bare by the time that he walked through the door.

If I could go back, I would point out the broken locks.

I would strip away his satisfaction so that there was nothing left between us,

Ask him if he thought he was really the first man to turn my tears into a laughing matter.

I would piece the broken shells of my own tongue into laughter,

Press my throat to his ear and let him hear the ocean in my chest.

But the man, he will never know how to listen.

He will never understand the way the word no dies in the throat,

Turns itself into a scream that my tongue cannot carry, a breath that my mouth cannot take.

Each time that I find myself alone in the dark,

I remind myself to breathe, but I cannot remember why I wanted to.

Now, each time that a man looks at my mouth I remember to swallow instead of smile.

I make sure to remind myself that the word manslaughter exists because sometimes a boy just cannot help himself –

And sometimes it just is not his fault, not when my body is made like this.

Not when he has been taught that I am not worth anymore than a peal of laughter in the dark.

How I am the dark, and how he did not know –

How he was reaching for something to hold onto and I got in the way.

A boy laughs, and as it splashes against bedroom walls

I remind myself that sometimes things are not just taken away, they are strangled.

My head held slack, neck bent, cracked;

He seems to think that if he reaches far enough inside of me, he can pull the woman from the girl –

Or maybe now it is the girl from the woman, how I have grown.

How I do not know what it means to be proud to be called either.

Sometimes men look at me as if they were the first to come looking,

As if there is everything to be found here, as if there is anything at all.

Sometimes men look at me as if they do not know that some lost girls never find their way back home,

As if they have never walked alone down the street and practiced their last words at the same time.

Men talk and do not care that I am listening,

They tell me to never trust a man unless it is them, to never leave the scene of a crime

Or they will have no choice but to call the place where my body rests a dumpsite –

As if it were my fault, as if I asked for it, as if I deserve it because

What kind of girl would ever dare leave them?

What kind of girl would run into the safety of the dark instead of away from it?

Now I make sure to place flowers on my nightstand,

I braid fairytales into my hair and tuck pieces of the people that I love most into my pockets.

I want to make sure that there is always something pretty nearby to hold on the way out,

That there are always pieces of me to be found after I have gone.

Little girl lost they call, and I will answer because this is what it is:

Each time that I have torn skin it has only ever been my own.

Is this not what I am made for, to flinch at my own softness?

To look up at them when they talk down to me?

It is like learning to breathe through a broken nose that never heals, the weight of this.

This mouth that does not know how to speak,

That can only seem to remember the taste of the things that it would much rather forget.

How they will name me heartbreak,

How they will blame my sadness for their own, say that they were expecting something different from what they got:

A love letter where there is only a eulogy,

A graveyard where there is supposed to be a girl.

Their disappointment and me, we taste the same;

And I like to think that like this, I will not ever be forgotten either.