My grandmother taught herself to fall in love by sprinkling
a circle of salt around her ankles every morning in order to learn
what it feels like to be surrounded by bruises.
I taught myself to fall in love with alcohol and a ring of birth control pills.
My mother still frosts the mirror with her years-old wedding dress
in hopes that the old memories will somehow translate into the new;
I still keep the key to the house of the first man I ever fell for
inside my back left dresser drawer
in hopes that one day he’ll give me a reason to slide it through the door.
My aunt hides a stash of her bloody baby teeth, guards it with her life,
and places one inside the pillow of every man she ever sleeps with
so he’ll equate some magic from his childhood
with the way her body felt beneath his own.
And me, I do the same with scars,
except I leave them in all the public places on my skin
so someone else can learn to fall in love with the way
I feel pain in private.
I learned how to fall in love from several generations of women,
women whose hearts were less heart and more broken work of art,
and that’s probably why it’s so hard for me
to fall for someone who doesn’t hurt to touch.