Rules of Engagement
This is how
you get him to hate you:
speak.
Of weakness, of weather
of money and mothers;
guileless, you dribble the barbs
hook the soft spot between his ribs
where it aches cavity-sweet.
What he once thought sweet
turns bitter; your sapling
turns kindling between you.
The more you speak
the more the words abrade
until even a comment ground clean
of edges sends him thrashing.
He loved your voice once
but now you see the snarl
before the words ever vibrate
out of your collapsed throat, like
you’re coughing out flies,
maggots on his dead pride.
You spiderweb your words
before they have a chance
to weave a glare from his eyes
but sometimes you forget and
something buzzes free,
alighting on clenched fists.
To calm him you must be
an ornithologist and study
the exact manner in which he nests his anger,
how he spins bloodwarm insults
and stumbled memories of your mistakes
into a wreath of thorn and tinder.
Note its shape and contour
cloistered in the net of his tendons
brushing his lungs, embraced by the soft things
he no longer shares with you.
The rage is stone,
like his fists,
crudely formed and unyielding, acidic
when named.
This is how
you get him to hit you:
have skin.
Wear it before him, plain or
glazed with pigment,
just wear it
without care.
Pump blood through the fields
of your flesh carelessly and let
the lullaby throb that catches his ear
ring out against the laundry basket.
Bouquets of flowers become
bouquets of bone; caress his gift
of knuckles with a hemorrhage of your own,
cradling everything he can’t say
in the space between
the wind up and the bruise.
A flinch is an invitation
to draw the violet from your cheeks.
A scream a request
to ease the red from your flesh.
In the mirror, you tilt your face,
noting all the colors his hands
can wring from you.
This is how
you get him to kill you:
breathe.
Become unbearably alive,
an insult of
an existence.
Exhale and watch
his rage crown from
his skin with a snarl
sharp as birth.
Inhale his fists, and let
the snake of blood from your temple
coil on your fingertips.
Wear the nature of his defeat
like rubies.
This is how
you die:
smiling.