How Many Cheeks Did You Expect Me to Turn?
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
They taught me mercy like a rule—
a neat, polite arithmetic: one cheek given, one blow forgiven.
So I practised patience until my skin learned the geography of bruises,
until my jaw grew used to the rhythm of apology.
How many cheeks did you expect me to turn?
One? Two? An inventory of wounds counted like repentance?
My head is a metronome gone wrong, shaking back and forth,
my cheeks raw as paper left in a storm.
I am dizzy from the ledger of your blows—each strike a ledger line,
each forgiveness an entry that never balanced.
You taught me to be small; you taught me to fold.
You asked me to catalogue my own humiliation as virtue.
But virtue does not thrive on repetition.
Mercy is not a ransom you are owed; it is a choice, not an obligation.
How many cheeks did you expect me to turn?
Enough that you might grow bored and stop?
Enough that I would be hollowed to your liking—
a cupped echo of my former self, soft and empty?
No. I will not be the landscape you keep reshaping with your cruelty.
I have a life beyond the circumference of your hand.
I keep house with hope and small luminous things: mornings, names, the stubborn colour of the sky.
I have people who collect my laughter and stitch it back together when it frays.
I have plans that do not begin with apology.
I have a mouth that remembers its own speech.
So ask me again, if you must—how many cheeks?—
and I will answer with the slow, irrevocable movement of leaving.
I will stop turning; I will start drawing borders.
I will learn the language of refusal, the grammar of self-defence.
I will gather my days and build a life that cannot be vandalised.
You live for the demolition of others; I live to be whole.
There is a world that wants me alive and unbroken;
there is more to steward than the soft tissue of my forgiveness.
How many cheeks did you expect me to turn?
None left. I am done turning. I am beginning.
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