Inside me, a small animal wakes with teeth.
It is not anger at first.
It is a wet, trembling thing,
where the soft organs keep their secrets,
where language arrives late
with the patience of something
that has learned it will not be rescued.
Each morning it tries again:
a careful unthreading of muscle,
The doctors would call it inflammation.
My mother might call it temperament.
The world prefers the word rage,
because it sounds like something that can be dismissed,
But I have seen it up close.
I have felt its small, deliberate hands
pressing against the inner walls of me,
It whispers in a language older than fury:
Sometimes it grows larger,
fills the cavity of my chest
until my voice sharpens into something metallic,
something that startles even me.
As if I have not been asking the same question
every hand that held me only
only when I could translate myself
into something easier to keep.
how carefully I have fed this creature,
on crumbs of almost-tenderness,
on glances mistaken for devotion,
on the thin broth of being needed
Not with the kind of wanting
and I will still come closer.
Not with the kind of wanting
to tuck away the inconvenient weather
The animal grows restless.
It has learned the shape of my disappointments,
has memorized the echo of rooms
where I offered my whole body as a question
and received only partial answers.
across the slick interiors of me,
leaving marks that bloom into heat.
This is what they call rage.
at the threshold of my throat,
what happened the last time
it tried to speak plainly.
I place my hand over my chest,
this creature made of all the times
I was not held with sincerity,
all the times enthusiasm was rationed,
all the times love arrived
wearing conditions like a uniform.
You are not here to burn me down.
You are trying to be born.
And somewhere, impossibly,
inside the same body that houses you,
stretching itself wide as skyâ
a love that has not yet learned
you finally break through,
but as something with open hands.
I was never asking to destroy.
to be held like I mattered
without earning it first.
in the bright, unafraid way
sunlight wants the morning.
I will not call you anger.
what you have always been:
the bodyâs last, stubborn attempt
- sometimes the small shivering thing is hope, by mav
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