Learning To Love Yourself Again by Chris Murray

I want to write love poems to my own body.

So I’ve started taking the ones
I wrote for you
and replacing every
“you” with “I.”

Now I know I too
love the taste of the ocean
and I will grow like mountains
if I want to.

I will write my body
into a metaphor and
let it dissolve between line breaks,
because poetry is not just beautiful
and neither am I.

Someday fingers will graze over
a flat chest and say
I can feel your heartbeat better this way.

More importantly
someday I will lay my hand
against my earth-body
and say I finally understand why
my heart is beating now,
say I can hear rivers
running through me
and they won’t stop for anyone.