writing poems about love

I was 14 when he asked to see me. "Really" see me. He was 16, at the time, so I ducked into my mother's bedroom and cowered in front of the mirror for him. My underwear had pink bows. I didn't know what touching himself meant. He adorned me and adored me and still the walls cracked and moaned under the weight of his fist. He wrote me a poem. Commissioned a storyteller to perform it. Something about silver rain and Fuck these men with their fists and their needs and their insistence on voting for men who treat women like property and still he posted something on the website we met on. Last week. Some rambly purple prose about forgive- ness, about getting closure. About people who think they haven't done wrong, and forgiving them anyway. I hurt him, badly. And I regret it only for the principle of hurting anyone at all. Whenever he finds another girl, I hope she knows how to leave when his fist bleeds.