// tw: rape
honey;
baby's as sweet as sugar,
suckles on cherry pits and bathes in tangerine juice and agave.
her skin's made of mom's favourite china plates and the satins that all the movie stars wear,
and when she smiles honey seeps out of the creases in her eyes and the dimples in her cheeks.
she never runs in gym class but that doesn't matter,
'cause her blood's stained bright red and syrupy from the adoration of all the boys n girls,
and that's enough to keep her heart going strong.
overripe plum drips from her lips and midsummer dew settles on her eyelashes while she sleeps,
and beggars sit at the foot of her bed
to soak in her innocence.
the beggars don't like when baby starts to grow up,
when hair sprouts from her legs and pretty boys' lips sink into the gaps of her teeth.
most leave when they find the hickey on her neck,
but not him.
he stays to climb her cotton bedsheets,
shoves his tongue down her throat and uses it to rob her of her organs,
wrings out her kidneys and punctures her stomach before bile can leave her throat.
his sweat drips onto her teeth until they crack and rot and fall out,
and he drains her thighs till his mouth's cherry red and her skin's crumpled white.
he stretches out her legs so they swing from side to side like limbs of the dolls in the corner of her room,
and muffles her screams with a calloused hand in her swollen throat.
shoves himself into her skin and paints the dips of her body with her dripping mascara,
drinks up the air in her lungs and the love in her blood and the life in her bones
so he can fit a body double her size into her rotting honey skin.
and then he leaves,
wearing her organs as his new clothes and sipping on her peach syrup innocence under the honeydew sun,
and baby is a baby no more.
