Where Care Meets Cruelty
by Anna Marie Kinkead
You rejected me so delicately that I could barely tell.
Gently, you held me, so wanting to be in love,
yet not quite able.
The last kiss
Ecstasy before the rejection takes shape
Disbelieving, I blurted, “But my lips are still bruised from your kisses.”
We spoke in the psychobabble that dressed our trauma wounds,
bathing in the comfort of a shared vocabulary.
Your heart said yes, but my age said no.
Our diagnoses said, do it!
My charms were too few, my years too many.
But you left tenderly,
with care for the hurt of my heart.
***
Anna Marie Kinkead loves all that is authentic and that speaks to the reality of lived human experience. Her book reviews have appeared in the Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health. Recently, her creative work has appeared in Down in the Dirt, Wildfire Words, Verse-Virtual, The Khaotic Good and Spillwords. She is currently exploring writing as therapy, distilling what is raw and real, and as a tool for understanding discordance within ourselves.
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