empty head

LITTLE GIRL, YOU ARE MADE OF MEAT delicious, juicy, exquisite a plump fruit, heaving with seeds and nectar dangling coquettishly over our heads. ripe at age 18 (or 16 in some countries) though some insist the taste is sweeter when picked early we are famished, pacing beneath your blood-filled body we smell your scent, show restraint how shameful, to be caught red-handed! LITTLE GIRL, BE CAUTIOUS: YOUR HANDS ARE BLUNT AND SOFT giggle as the boys lavish attention on you as they salivate at the sight of your skin, your red, red cheeks measure your cuts with their eyes let them stroke your hair harvest words from your tongue, drink the milk from your teat; distract them when they plead with you, 'just one nibble!' you must find a way to endure this, for it is far worse to be discarded LITTLE GIRL WHAT HAPPENED? i don't remember a thing but my heart still hears it CHOP, CHOP, CHOP

sensation hot and gold, lizard bask on rock. heat through fold, a slip of paper held and told. crucial importance blind my eyes, guide my claw, i bide and break within.

i have a kind face an angular face. soft the face of a soul that yearns to be seen - holds herself at arms length, knows to be brave time is her mother. she lets her in. she tends her wounds. she breathes with her. more than the sum of her parts lost - she never kept count, anyway   maybe she won't notice if i keep it.

i hold her hand tighter but for some reason i make sure to hide my white knuckles. i dont know what im scared of. theyre just part of my hands, this time

veins press through the thin, waxy skin on my face feeling for warmth only to keep the creaking sinew moving blue and green, pooling, my bruises don't heal but merely feeling warmth is enough for some --- if one day she opens me up to find out why i cannot bleed, why she cannot drink, why i can move and touch her but never satisfy and finds she has been cheated into feeding a greedy and deceitful corpse how sick will she feel, abstaining so long while i took from her decadently --- the bags under my eyes swell with salt the dried skin on my face is cold and rigid the trapped fluid beneath the surface stagnates until my shape starts to sink bloated and rotting, i shrink into myself and pray that maybe this time i won't wake up