Will you tell your daughters
of the daughters’
necks you coated in saliva? How you
filled their ears with hot breaths of
I’m going to make you feel
beautiful
but made them feel their own nails
clawing at all the places you touched
them, made them peel off the skin that
belonged to them until you claimed it
as yours?

Will you tell your daughters
of the daughters
who left you in bed,
or on the couch,
or on the floor,
to climb into the shower where
they boiled off flesh and scrubbed
down to the hollows of their bones,
trying to erase the imprints you left,
the ones that left
them feeling filthy?

Will you tell your daughters
that when you were a boy
you ruined the same young bodies
you now try to protect?