Kept a permanent division between her thighs
and in the eyes of boys her body was a playground.
Young men slid down her swirling slide,
counting a game of tag on her outstretched arms
hoping for something more than sex but less than intimacy.
Placed intricately,
she hid subliminal messages on her eyelids, for the men who cracked her soul in half.
Flesh less than fresh, she begins to spoil good intentions begin to expire,
No stranger to a man’s dirty sheets,
a contortionist of sorts
so she curls her self esteem to fit into even smaller roles of womanhood.
This beauty now a woman of her own
wiped men off her mother’s lips and color on to hers,
learning that a whore was nothing more than an opportunist
tuning the sounds of moans into money
and lucky enough her drum like hips played the beats that men could bob to.
Her body ached with whispers of absentee fathers
had her searching for father figures in their palms
as palms slid over her renovations
looking to sow their seeds,
burying their burdens
and like new buds they bloomed
allowing roots to spread through her like a run on sentence,
crippling all things living,
used her like a shell,
hollow molded folds of themselves
she is a memory of a mother who saw a business instead of her innocence,
gave herself up to the highest bidder,
tally marks told the story her lips couldn’t part to speak
so she frantically searches warm bodies
for a space carved out
where she would remain safe,
perfected her craft of mastering the art of men,
then again getting lost between beats,
between sheets,
doesn’t necessarily iron out the sounds of a creep,
childhood stolen with every night blanketed in darkness like a war- torn by dark land soaked with blood she is still silent enough to know what her mother’s heart beat sounds like,
melodies of a history stuck on repeat,
in her daughters eyes are the hands that never wanted to be held,
just hidden
and , Learned this from a mother who never learned the rules so being lost is the closest to being found she'll ever be willing to sacrifice.