The Hand That Feeds

They said "don't bite the hand that feeds you"

I gave it acid burns instead,

and bit the hand that starved me

purging flesh back onto the plate.

I won't digest your lies.

I see right through you,

to the bone,

you are not a mother,

you can barely live on your own.

And cries go unanswered

but answers to questions I never asked

are fed to me

like a diet of porous stone.

Step on the scale and weigh your worth,

I watched and followed in your footsteps,

examining nutrition labels with

more thought than you gave my words

and pinching skin as if

pulling hard enough would

rip it off your skeleton

but you only piled the weight onto

both of us and being a child,

I soaked it all in like a sponge,

a new found self-hate running

through my blood.

Resentment festers in my gut like a virus,

fills my stomach,

pours over my bottom lip.

Eroding my intestines,

uprooting the hair from my head,

as if ridding a garden of weeds.

heart rate beating slower,

bones becoming hollow,

you fed me emptiness

and I became the absence of a daughter.