At seventeen the first one pressed himself up against you
with the force of a hurricane and threw rotten mangos
at your window the night after you refused to go down on him.
But you were always just a long shot, the woman with a heart
like that trick at the doctor’s office, the one where the knee
is tapped with the hammer and it jumps like a kite string-
no matter how many times you were hit, your heart kicked back.
Two black eyes and six tubes of concealer later,
the drugstore clerks finally stopped asking what was wrong.
Then the dark-haired poet at twenty, who drank for breakfast,
lunch, and dinner, men who claimed to see inside your soul
but never had the patience to remove your clothes
for any purpose other than performing an act that required
a condom. At twenty-three, you learned the meaning
of the word spare: secondhand, hand-me-down lover
for a butcher with ten other women in his bed
that he treated just like pieces of meat.
The irony of the whole situation took a long time to sink in.
You spent several months trying to rinse them out
of your mouth, scrub their hands from your bones
trace your way back to the sea. At twenty-seven
you forgot what men’s faces looked like without
jail bars in front of them, didn’t you? It was a relief
at thirty to finally find one who didn’t pronounce your name
like he was wondering what his would sound like
immediately after it.