The Birth Defect that Made Me Afraid to Love By aldo kraas, www.PoetryPoem.com/poet11586 Unlock all Features - Upgrade to Poetry Prime
In my spare time I design ways to make people fall in love
with anyone but me. It's hard business, a nine-to- five job,
but better than having to deal with unwanted feelings.
The scar from my mother's caesarean section still stretches across
half her belly like a crescent moon, and sometimes I wonder
If that's why my father left her: because she had already been cut open
before he'd had a chance to do it himself.
In my apartment I stack slips of paper with men's phone numbers
Into piles that I later crisp into ash with my lighter.
All the other tenants in the building think I have Friday night bonfires
Where I cook hot dogs and hanburgers over the grill.
They don't realize that the smell of smoke comes from some version
of unrequited love. My rejection letters to jilted men always end
with the words don't call me again.
Maybe all of this somehow relates back to my childhood,
When the boy across the block knocked down a wasp nest
with his baseball bat, like the nest was a pinata setting the wasp upon me
stinging me so many times I grew to associate love with hurt
But whatever it is my psychology professor sugests
that maybe I was turned upside down in the wonb,
my tiny fists flailing like compass needles,
until my feet instead of my head pointed to my motherr's heart
so I grew up unable to listen to anyone else's heartbeat
without wanting to kick into silence.
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