Generic Hip!

In the checkout aisle, you and me.
I with one cart and you with
three.
One on the hip, another by your side,
and the last one sitting on your toes.
I can’t say my “cart”
pinches my cheeks with
wet fingers or
screams for jelly beans that
scatter on the floor.
It got me thinking, you and me,
as perhaps I am you, a grocer ago,
and you are me, with the family dinner.
And you are all of them, when they ask me,
and I tell them-
(“No.”)
(“I’m not sure.”)
(“Maybe just one.”)
(“A well-behaved girl.”)
(“...No.”)
What else could I say as you stand in front of me,
a creature with creatures of her own, who loathes her own reflection?
I see:
Deflation in human form, a balloon
straight out of the bag, exhaustion like
perfume that is utterly sensorial as it stains every
step you take, refusing to look at your body as you
watch your boundless ambitions and belief that you are
different and special
clawed and
splintered by the dirty fingernails of your various
spawns as they clasp onto everything: your neck, cheek,
hair, earrings, your
body is their body, another
generic hip on which baby after baby
sits.
Women.
Children.
If you didn’t, would you still wonder what it’d be like
if you had?