Self-Portrait Through My Cracked Bedroom Door

Editorial Content Warning: This poem contains violent imagery and references to abuse.

There’s a hole in my bedroom door

from the time you slammed your fist through the panels

Splintered wood and

blood rivers streaming past your bony knuckles

Is that truly the same ichor coursing through my veins?

You said you’d fix the door

but this house has enough holes

To bear more resemblance to Swiss cheese

than a home

The bedroom walls sweat from your incendiary temper

my overgrown five-foot frame is glued to the twin size mattress

And melts through the floorboards

You inflict violence with a curl of your forked tongue,

ignite danger with a bottle on your lips

And raise hell with divine or demonic ambiguity—

it’s uncertain if I fear you

Or envy you

I stagger over broken promises,

vacant apologies

And indigo bruises

poisoning the lawn behind the white picket fence

Digging through rotten plants and depleted soil

On cross-hatched knees

Futility decorates my fractured fingernails

as I claw for a tunnel leading me out of

This burning house

but it seems as though

I’m already

on fire

I am haunted by my DNA

like father, like daughter

How do I suppress the paternal genome from taking root?

more of your features usurp mine,

Marring my ghastly complexion

Now the bathroom sparkles with shattered mirror glass

and warm ichor sticks to my lacerated palm

I suppose it’s impossible to be me without weeds of you

I tiptoe around all the fractures littering the linoleum floor,

hallway hardwood

And bedroom carpet

as smoke billows out the window

Daddy, please tell me

how does one forgive and forget

when my bedroom door remains broken?