When Pee Pads Leak Through

Liana Hartman, “Forever”

I watch doe eyed, in the ignored piss stained ambience 

frictioning against the periwinkle of

 my night dress, an obscured figure, 

its wet vulnerability sucked

 into a stained ribbed tank crusted 

with a sickly smell bound to it.

It forages for liquid pride in the fridge.

“Didn’t I tell you to get to bed?” 

     Its stench of pee caught my tongue; I gawk in awe

Of the unseemly setting, like a prying cat’s once riddled corpse.

“I’m okay, I promise. Don’t worry about me.”

It clambers throughout the kitchen,

cursing and crying words I’ve never heard before.

A slim dirty finger washes over the rouge of its lips.

“Our little secret, okay? Now go to sleep.”

I would not bite its hand, if it could not feed me once; for I have stood

 in piss stains. I could echo the comfort to reach the 

scorned and urinated youth in the unknown figure. But

 its hands have already covered my mouth in a broken smile.

Wide eyed,         I sit between the grey

and pained version of me 

and a skinny body wrapped in tweed;

I stare into the gaping

 ether, contorting the lies 

reality set ahead of me.

The warm lights of a pungent office flicker

“To get to the root of the problem, tell me when this began”

Though its promise is buried under a rug woven in generations,

I remember the liquid pride and the tucked away spoiled shame.

“No problems to tell, Doc. There’s nothing wrong with my kid.”

There is—and it’s from it, but that will never be brought into the balmy aroma.

Not in the nauseating car ride, not at the sticky kitchen table, and not at the wetted bed.

“You know I love you; you can talk to me about anything.”

But this reassurance is broken, like our flimsy secrets.

We never talk, not about anything real.

Glass eyed,         in a car ride within

the hottest solstice was a pained and youthful 

apparition of what I inherited, radiant

with its hysterics. In a frenzy screaming 

at the antique and clouded version of it,

I crave for a response, a comfort, a promise. 

But it never got that;

Its limbs thrash against the burning leather.

“…”

Silence. They are met with silence.

This is why I am silent

Teary eyed,         quiet, I watch the old shadow

And a familiar ghost in the mirror;

Wretched with the same grey and pained look 

In a daze, waiting for the frenzy it shouts,

splashing the taste of paraphernalia

onto my bisque complexion.

Its rough hands slide across a weathered face

“Well say something!”

I understand why it’s obscured—a shadow, drenched in a urinated 

 undisclosed past, but I can’t bury myself under a rug, I didn’t deserve.

“I had it so much worse, I don’t tell you half the stuff I was put through”

Before I gift it another ramble,

Before it bothers with a breath;

“Don’t look back in anger, if you won’t talk to me.”

But I won’t look back in anger, in fact, I won’t look back at all.

you may have not received any, but “You don’t deserve my words.”