seven layers of a wound

'Seven Layers of a Wound' is a seven part non-fiction verse novel I began in 2003 about my first love. He knows who he is. This is completely unedited, which I'm sure your eagle eye will detect without too much trouble. It needs a brutal edit and I need to finish it. Here is the first layer.


The First Layer – Green eyes, Blue eyes, Your eyes.

his girlfriend's party

Had heard that he liked me more
than his girlfriend.
He called me in hospital, visited me with
fistfuls of daisies, and told me
how much he cared for me.
I knew where this was going.
And I liked it.
One night, she had a party.
Too sick to go, he called me
from her house.
Broke up with her.
On her birthday.
It felt like my birthday.


sixteen

it was crash bang boom and I was in love with him and he with me and it was going to last forever because he wrote me letters asking me to be his wife and have his children and we were sixteen but it didn’t matter because I loved him and it was going to last forever because I loved him and he loved me and it was going to last forever. Because.


the meaning of things

He went down on me for the first time
while our parents were in the kitchen.
My throat on fire, curbing that vocal wrench.
My juices seeped
because I’ve come,
so I grab his hair
shoving him deeper into me
so his tongue was hidden between
the layers of my cunt.
His hot tongue –
like it had been dipped in a freshly drawn bath,
was so warm.
He suckled on my cunt the way a baby feeds.

To be fucked by a tongue;
rising and falling and circling
past the lips of your cunt and into that warm
hollow.

You need a sharp tongue for that.
A long tongue.

We never fucked.


big girl's don't cry

Being sick was too much for him.
He wanted a normal girlfriend.
One who would not be sick,
who could do things normal
sixteen year old girls do
like dance,
go out in the cold,
have sex.

I cried for weeks —
a torrent that could not be stoppered.
I stuck plugs in my eyes to stop
the tears,
but circles darkened as though I had been
punched.

I knew girls at school had heard.
That they were talking about me.
I probably deserved it for stealing him away.
But I hadn’t stolen him from her.
He had pocketed my heart and come to me.


breather

I stayed away from school.
Melinda died and all I could think in the car on the way to her funeral was,
‘I wish he was here to hold my hand, and for me to hold his.’

She was his friend, too.

The wound of him never healed
for time doesn’t heal wounds like that when they’re raw and bloody and have left a cleave in your chest
where it dulls to a blunt unfeeling.
I partly melted until I was a shell of a girl where no one understood me
and I hid myself away.

He changed me.
He broke me.


remembering

His brother’s engagement party
where he vomited after too much tequila trying to impress me.
I wore my sister’s good jacket.
It was raining and the tyres packed the gravel,
pebbles rubbing against each other, crunching under the weight of my wanting to be tucked into some nook while speeches were being spoken and glasses raised.
I met his parent’s friends and I was the darling.
I was a part of him and he a part of me.