2
The Cycles of Abuse
by Mikaela Schiller
“I can take a punch”
Says the sixteen year old girl to her friends,
Only jokingly, of course, or at least that’s what they think,
as she tells her friends,
“Go ahead hit me”
Because it could never hurt as much as it did
The first time her dad punched her in the eye when
She was just ten years old.
Black and blue like the sky,
On the night her boyfriend, age seventeen,
Left her with skin the color of the sky.
Yet, no tears ever came.
Because no tears ever came.
Maybe someday, she’ll leave.
When she’s 23 she walks down the aisle,
With red marks up and down her sides that match
The color of her lipstick.
With a death grip on her bouquet,
She smiles, because she knows that
Crying would only ruin her makeup,
And that would only anger him even more.
Her therapist asks why she stayed for so long,
All she can think to answer,
Is that it had never occurred to her in all her 35 year
That she was allowed to leave.
Once again her therapist asks, why?
The tears of the past thirty years stream down her face as
She says, “I learned to take a punch. I never learned how
To be anything but a punching bag, I never learned that it was wrong”