Maybe I need it, the bitten lip.

It’s impossible, and frightful, to rest in a place where babies appear at every traffic light. Like the intersection where there is a bench advertising an infant, not a realtor, growing a bubble from its skull that says: “You complete me.”

She leans on the public bay, near to the condescending infant, filling her gaps, pumping up lips with honeycomb and olive juice. Feeling two ovaries and a stomach full of wine collide with each stretch. 

“We have definitions for people like you,” it signed, with tiny, chubby fingers, eyeing her dress barely draping kneecaps, too aware of themselves. 

“You’re a withholder, and more,” it mouthed. “The sooner you can sleep with that, the better you’ll know what you can’t mean.” 

She stares inside her chest, suddenly broken open, and feels the magic marker on newsprint, soaking everything into a pulpy story of how it’s spelled and where can the sentence go without killing the feeling of breeze tossing each strand.

So she falls back an hour, to straws in lighted summer drinks and stained teeth in the pond. To where the pink elephants on her coaster are scraping her tongue, and feeding her sparkling water, washing away bloody gums. In her corner, taping split lips, and a fractured bridge.

Telling her: When would it ever be just pretty, to fight something so hard? 

She falls back to where maybe instead, he pulled over and stepped into the road, to gather each marble from her backpack. Collecting the paper trail of her escape, in his bundled up Marmot soft shell. A cable television program of how their house burned down to nothing that felt like home. To the place where he realizes how this isn’t a carnival in a parking lot, and she isn’t his puppet. That he would draw topographic maps of her circulatory system, number and chart every joint, if she needed. 

To where he would tell her he could merely brush her face and every letter would make a word, would make a song, would make a banner to promote, not surrender. Where he would tilt his head back when he admitted he wasn’t ready to cross her off the list. To the look on her face when she couldn’t think of the shape of that one sculpture in a museum of housewives three winters ago. To where every day, he had a summary of how her cheeks were getting fleshier, and he preferred it.