Tough Love

By Sarena Pollock

Love tastes something like blood on asphalt,  

the way sidewalk cracks manage to stifle the shock 

of impact through absorption, a concrete cushion. 

When I was six and tumbled on the macadam 

with a busted kneecap, Grandma chastised me for shedding tears 

over such a stupid thing. Years later,  

I take her advice to heart:  

why cry over something outside my control?  

Why cry at all? Can you believe,  

I once loved a girl who used her words  

to crack me open in bed—every poet’s predisposition 

is to love someone who acts like you’re their favorite verse— 

who saw my body as an elegy worth owning  

yet brittle enough to shatter? When I discovered she made home 

between my best friend’s thighs, I did not cry,  

though fragments of grief pierced 

the pit of my stomach, a perpetual plunge into the abyss, 

anticipating the cement’s inevitable collision.  

After all, this wasn’t the first time my bones  

turned to gravel. This wouldn’t be the last time my skin

contorted underneath someone else’s hands.

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Sarena Pollock (she/her) is a Publications Support Assistant for Montgomery County Intermediate Unit. She graduated from Susquehanna University in 2020 with a BA in Creative Writing, where she was the recipient of the Gary and Elizabeth Fincke Outstanding Senior Portfolio Prize. She is the author of After the Impact (Chrysalis Press, 2019), and her work appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Albion Review, and Laurel Moon, among others.