by Lydia Swartz
I started hitting him because I was a pillar of fire and his jaw was the ocean.
I started hitting him because we both believed I was powerless.
I hit him the first time because he blocked the door and I couldn't get out.
I hit him because he was bigger than me.
I hit him because I was weak and after all I couldn't really harm him, could I.
I hit him because I had no skin and he had lots of it.
I hit him because my eyes were already puffy from crying.
I hit him because the crisscrosses made me happy and filled me with rage.
I hit him because I was high, but not high enough.
I hit him because it was easier than admitting how scared I was all the time.
I hit him because what we called love was only an excuse to strangle each other.
I hit him because it was the closest I could get to him physically.
I hit him because I didn't want to hurt his feelings and it was easier than saying "I'm sorry."
I hit him because I hated myself and it was easier than getting him to hit ME.
I hit him because it doesn't count if you're a girl.
I hit him because no one would ever find out.
I hit him because no one thought I could.
I hit him because no one else was around to hit.
I hit him because I didn't know how not to.
I hit him because I had lots of words and he didn't hear them.
I hit him because my idea had been to save the world but my job was in a steno pool.
I hit him because the poems and stories were stuck inside me, festering, necrotic.
I hit him because I wanted someone to share sunrise with who might not be hung over.
I hit him because I married him as an antidote to loneliness but it didn't work.
I hit him because neither one of us had the balls to admit we got married by accident.
I hit him because I still thought dick was what I wanted, just not his.
I hit him because I was decades away from finding out what kind of perv I already was.
I hit him because he wasn't like me, and he didn't know me.
I hit him because I had never sat long enough to discover we were threads in the same glorious fabric.
I stopped hitting him when I was 19 because he was never bigger than I was.
I stopped hitting him because when I hit his glass jaw we both bled from the sharp edge of fear.
I stopped hitting because I was covered with smoke and ash that never wash off.
---
Lydia Swartz is an omnivorous succubus and sidewalk-psychic flaneur. Minor Arcana Press published her deck of Shuffle Poems in 2014. Lydia tweets (as Kate, muggle name) and blogs. Her work has appeared recently in SHIFT, Seattle-based queer art mag, and in Literary Orphans, among others. After spending a cold winter month in Truth or Consequences, NM, it seems Lydia is a meshugenah text-based artist. Bitchmuse laughs and conjures her next penetration.