Brialee Turner

“Is love wrong?”
I ask myself
With a burning pain
In the frontal lobe
Of my brain,
And a chasm
In my stomach and chest
A sense of seething
Anxiety
That tells me
“Your love will send you
To hell.”

I am burning.

A flash in my mind,
An image of
A thin bleeding cut
On my thigh,
I am surprised
By the realization
That this shame
And loathing
Is reminiscent
Of when I marked
My hips and thighs
To cope with
These feelings
Before.

That I harmed
Myself
Because of my love
For someone else
And that I started
To injure
My beautiful soul
In order to suppress
Natural and organic
Elements of
Of who I am.