I am a ration cabinet.  

Every time you squeeze through my doors, under the loose chain, you take bits and pieces of me. 

I cannot move. Two years ago since we split, you pass the time by threading out my nerves one by one, 

Tying them together, 

And insisting you can use them as your own. 

They were yours to begin with, after all.  

I wondered where that nick in my hand came from and 

I think that's where they would've put an IV. 

I'm sure you did that yourself, out of petty spite, 

To show me what I should've been. 

We've both been unnecessary. 

I am trying to push past dizzying screams but I watched you mop up our blood I spilled and braid your hair with it.   

I don't want to braid my hair again, stop asking me that! 

Remind me what my blood type is. I know you will give it back later, but this time I will make the opening to my vein.  

We're experts at it, after all.  

I am forgetting to breathe. My lungs are yours for now. 

I feel your bile rising in my throat. 

I will revise this later when words are not polarizing magnets at my fingertips.  

You are not allowed to touch this, this is my artwork. 

The only thing you're allowed to revise is your plan to clean up a little or pay some rent in my head! 

I feel your bile rising in my throat. 

I am a ration cabinet.  

Take what you need, I guess. 

I don't need it for now. 

I told you, we do not have the same hands. 

Yours are cold. You are gone. I left you in that suicidal ice box during the bloodbath of an April afternoon,  

Not the other way around. 

I have no intention of returning for you. For myself? Perhaps. 

My hands are a different kind of cold, 

The human kind of cold. 

The cold where I can feel my snare drum of a pulse hammer desperately in my wrists and ears. 

The cold where I know there is chance to be warm again if I just reach out 

To another warm body. 

But not your kind of cold. 

Your cold has been marked by a tally of scars on my desk, in my rug, a cold that will only become colder and rot deeper into your skull until you become the monster I should've been 

Your cuts will flake away and fester. 

We made the same cuts but are left with different scars. 

Your name is still under the bed frame 

Lines of poetry don't bring you to life anymore. 

Not the human kind of life I have to experience.  

Don't get me off track here. 

I am your ration cabinet. 

My writing is slow and deliberate. You took the feeling from my fingers so you can press them into my temples again. 

Is this your handwriting? I forget. 

Are you the one writing this? I forget? 

I used to use this ink when a stranger would crawl through my window eyes and rob any feeling left in me. 

This pen wrote new ones in. 

I realize now you were the one breaking and entering so  

Thank you for finally showing your face.  

I am a ration cabinet. There is so much blood under my skin that you haven't seen, that you didn't know you had. 

I believe it belongs to me, now. 

I think at this point you have taken a fraction of my eyesight, too. 

When you and I split, we had the same prescription. Now, 

Your lenses are outdated. 

My vision is twisting and swaying to keep up with what you're seeing 

But I told you I told you 

I'm not yours anymore!  

Stop trying to make me see through your gouged out eyes  

You only look through a smokescreen of blood  

For the last time, girl, I'm sick of being a ration cabinet! 

Maybe that's not right. Maybe I am a bread box. 

Mom used to say we weren't much bigger than one. 

I really don't have that much a ration cabinet has to offer. 

I have crumbs and dust and sugar ants crawling in what remains of my skeleton.  

I am not a soldier. I am not a war veteran. 

And because of this, because of you,  

I never can be. 

However, because of this, because of you, 

I have one thing in common with most.