I ONLY KNOW LOVE AS A SISTER

My love is my own
and it festers like something dead
but it still feeds.
(And I want to tell you
I love you
but I cannot do it right.)

Like the tongue laps the blood
like the skin hugs the knife
like the dirt swallows the rot.
I do not know love that isn’t savage.
And I do not know how to bend, so I break.

I have known you your whole life
you are taller than the last time I saw you
but so much smaller.
You look more like me than you ever have
no one can see this but us.

Basking under the notorious sun
bleaching bare ribs and wilting lungs
we pick maggots from between bones
and kiss them before letting them go.
You could take out my heart.
I am the safest I will ever be.

Ask me to feed you
sleep in my sheets
ask me to kill something for you
and I will do it.
(Tell me that you need me
or that you love me
and I will pretend they are interchangeable.)

My flesh lives under your fingernails
and yours still wriggles in my teeth
when you eat can you still taste it?
That rage and that regret,
does it leave you hungry too?

I am bigger and we both know
I could have stopped you.
I know where all your old bruises are
I know where it’s tender
I know what to poke to make bleed

But I know it hurts less to break
(You didn’t mean it.
You cannot do it right.)
Blood comes off in the creeks here
and we can go and get clean tomorrow.
I know a place and I will be there tomorrow.

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Tayla Giles, 22, rural Australia ✯ IG: @taylagiles_ 

“Tayla is a daughter of dry and dusty Australia, and spent her girlhood knee-deep in cow shit and dirt, roaming never-ending paddocks, boundaries, and daydreams; creating a sweet and bloody breading ground to write and write and write, and now, tear her heart out and share with you.”