At fifteen a lewd boy, only 5’5 asked;
Will you pose for me with your legs spread?
She hadn’t shaved in three days, the stubble rubbed the backs of her calf where she pressed against enamel bath
A maelstrom in her eyes instead of pupils
He said; good, good, excellent, just like that … ba-aby
Now … Open them
And she remembered the first time she unfurled
Like those Chinese paper flowers that grow in water
A warm rose bud disturbed by prying fingers
She recalled the way unwanted thumb pealed her exposed
A fruit chewed on before ripening
The sting afterwards
Like she’d dried out all her moisture and hung like a salted fish to be slapped and dismissed
If she gave this boy, with sweat on his lip instead of hair, his hand down his pants yanking something terrible, a rolling storm, tattooing bruised landscape
His way would become her path
What would be next?
Can you scissor yourself over my friend and lower down like a stray bullet?
We’ll make money and you’ll have value
I’ll take care of you, afterward you can pretend it didn’t happen
We’ll smoke away the taste and I’ll move inside you until you release
Regret
It’s easier to prostitute yourself when nobody has your back and you didn’t learn how
To save yourself, to feel your worth
The sabotage within, so achingly familiar
If I do it’ll be like every other time I ruined myself over nothing, you say
Feeling deserving of the pain, shame is a funny fellow, makes you quite attached
When you’re adrift and running on empty
Who knew how easy it was to ruin a child?
Set in place, steps of greater sabotage
She could feel their sticky fingers on her thighs
The voices murmuring, it’s what you deserve
Sickness in a learned desire to be debased
On her knees being ridden like a horse, the riders
Grabbing her innocence, one handful of hair at a time
Til she was all used up and another empty set of eyes
Waiting for the next fix
She saw herself at thirty, dying in an empty room
And the boy who encouraged her now, high on himself and the vigor of youth
Didn’t know how easy it would be for her to tumble down the rabbit hole, he only thought of
Getting his cock sucked and how he could brag if she’d pose for his fantasies
She wasn’t his, she didn’t want to be the next hole, willingly bent over
She wasn’t a plastic doll or his fist, she didn’t exist for him to spank himself off
Her image was sacrosanct, her body inviolate
Her legs weren’t going to open and be his willing whore
Just because she felt empty inside and his thin flattery pretended to assuage, all the pain and losses
That wasn’t her path
He didn’t get to see her center or hold her up for inspection
The fine line between loss and lost is not so fine
She stood up for herself for the first time and learned
What we do, matters, impacts us, stays like a cancer
Life already hard, she needed all the breaks she could get
It began with leaving and not looking back
At the boy holding a camera in one hand
My feet were always too big for vintage shoes
TheFeatheredSleep 