Milk

This isn’t about how the child suckled, his flushed lips parted, eyes closed in a bliss of nourishment, the smell of his cheek after— This is about the text message she received from a lover years after the final time she breastfed— on her tank top this night, directly over the nipple: the small circular stain. She only notices it later when she brushes her hair in the mirror. The body with its leaked truths startles her in the bathroom light.

What else will her body semaphore when she ignores its urges, when she tries to escape

lust’s crusted remains? She peels off her top, examines the nipple. A terrible thrill, to see the body like this— to accept its rule. She imagines herself, once more, a spraying, dripping, spilling thing. Like the child she once fed, in her there remains a residue—even the risk of such a fullness—

Quelling words repeatedly used: erase, conquer, the dreaded make peace with— all seemed viable, possible—but when he would walk through a room, the flash of his neck (just watching him, mind blank): between her legs— the immediate & private betrayal.

In the body a desire once known is always carried—canonized. With her own hands at night, in bed, she remembers being touched. All he’d said in the text was how’s it going? This milk she thought long gone.