Maybe I Hate Your Poetry
BY LILLY SABELLA
Maybe I hate your poetry
and maybe I hope you drown in your metaphors
if you’d step away from your word of black microphones
and spotlights dressed with gleams of sweat
I’d tell you that I don’t want to hear
how the buildings look like potholes from the sky
or how her legs were like a fisherman’s net and
always getting wrapped around you.
I want to hear about kneeling at a pitch and
gasping on cold kitchen floors out of fear or ecstasy or maybe a little bit of both.
Tell me stories that make little girls want to dance
tell me stories that help our boys
tell me how in sixth grade you learned it was okay to cry.
I don’t want to hear you count back from ten
and repeat
tired cliches
between every line.
Keep them closed between your teeth
far out of my reach.
Tell me
about the knife in his head
or the one stuck in your heart.
Tell me how thinking of her is like that when you walk out of a
Broadway show and
Everything is bright and breathing and so fast
you’re swimming above a world of darkness and
you can’t get enough.
Tell me how you hate that ice cream cones are more expensive in the city
but you buy them anyway and let chocolate drip down your fingertips for me to lick off.
The streetlights are shutting off so we’re running fast.
Tell me about hating you and so
I hate myself too
because I think I’m watching a mirror
or don’t tell me anything at all.
Because I’m sick of hearing it. This heat is too hot,
this pounding is just too loud.
Maybe I hate poetry.
Maybe I hate writing too
and that’s like throwing up my own blood and brain.
I swallowed my vomit but wish I choked
But it doesn’t even matter because
I don’t know who I am anymore
and I can’t seem to find myself in your poetry any longer.
About the Author
Lilly Sabella is eighteen years old and she attends Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens, New York. If she couldn’t write, she would burst, or she would rather float away.
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