I know a mother when I see one

You know the type

The word is Bimbo, but even that takes some sort of authenticity.

These ones don’t have it.

Just women with hair bleached to bone, lashes like broken spider legs, all kinds of plastic, bodies sculpted by credit cards. Matching sets that scream it all away. Walking with a sway that begs to be noticed, hips pretending they’ve got something real to carry.

Then I see it.

Obvious by the way she eats.

Cutting a slice too small to taste, chewing slow as if she’s afraid to finish, she learned long ago to leave the best parts for someone else.

They catch me staring. They think its hunger, another young stud ready to chase. They’re half right. I’m looking, sure.

But I wouldn’t lick that skin, tanned to leather and worn thin by nameless men, it’d taste like regret, old sacrifices that never paid off.

No, I’d want to hold her hand. Feel the silence. Wipe at a tear she’ll never let fall.

But that’d never happened.

She wouldn’t let it and I wouldn’t try.

I know a mother when I see one.