Every 9 seconds

You don’t write love poems

For people who love you

You write love poems

For the people you love…

I learned this in the hospital

I was ignoring my pager’s insistent pulse

The same behavior he’d later tell his friends

Landed me in the E.R. in the 1st place

Top and bottom lip busted

Left eyelid hung low and swollen

Over freshly polished cheekbones

3 bruised ribs hiding not so quietly

Under 2 cracked ones

Left ankle screaming under the weight

Of the hospital blanket

Cuts & scratches announcing me

As an addition to the statistic of every 9 seconds

The girls on either side of me didn’t need that long

To recognize themselves staring back from behind my lashes

We sat there & made small talk

Not daring to discuss our obvious commonalities

We made no mention of our lives before the IV’S in our arms

We just knew

We understood how much it stung

to be on the bad side of a wrong answer

we had seen that white line

splitting the darkness of shut eyelids upon impact.

Yahaira, to my left

Pretty little thing

Laid on that gurney like a pool side lawn chair

Like she needed a vacation as if her life depended on it

And this was as close as she was gonna get

Shielded behind huge sunglasses

And hiding her small frame in a sweater way too heavy for June

I could only guess at what nightmares clung to her skin underneath as she fell asleep to meet them

She reminded me of some celebrity trying to elude the paparazzi

But no one poses to take the kinda shots she took

No one auditions for those close ups

Mel was the girl to my right

She knew her way around the cafeteria menu way too well to be new at this

On hospital report paper

& struck by some demented muse

She wrote him a love poem

Forgiven already, truly repentant and on his way to take her home she told me

I was disgusted

My breathe quickened as if the hospital air was laced with a cure to the sickness in our conversation

When he arrived, his fists still holding marks and gashes from their last tour of the warzone he had made out of her body, he offered her a $12 bouquet of violets and tiger lilies

the same blooming color of her compromises

Laid the flowers down so gently with a careful yet deliberate hand as if he was practicing; as if he knew that one day he would lay the same collection on her grave to adorn his last apology

I drew the curtains between us

Avoided eye contact

Listened to the echoes of his “I’m sorry’s” & “Never agains”

and to Mel reading her love poem

The only thing left unbroken by her devotion and his anger

and it clicked,

She didn't write that poem for him

she wrote that for the man she needed him to be

so that it made sense to stay

I guess she needed that to be able to live with herself

I guess fear and necessity can shut your eyes just as effectively as a well placed right hook

As for me,

I was discharged later that day

My lips took longer to heal than I expected

My shiner was gone in a few days

Cuts and bruises forgot themselves soon after that

My ribs seemed to have a more stubborn memory

As does my ankle, especially when the weather is bad

For about the first year after that

I expected to see Mel’s face on the 6 o’clock news

Somewhere between the traffic report and

Community job fair announcements

I still cringe when passing missing person boards

Terrified to see her face staring back at me asking “Have you seen me?”

It only took me once to learn my lesson

Never go back, don’t answer the phone calls

Always remember what he's capable of

Love like that will make you a martyr if allowed to

It may read like a sonnet but it bleeds like an obituary

To this day, whenever I sit down to write a poem,

especially a love poem

I think of her

she reminds me that I better be damned sure who I am writing that piece for because after all

People don’t write love poems for the ones who love them

People write love poems for the people they love.