This winter, I find myself raw, chapped and tender like the skin of my over-chewed bottom lip.
My mouth is always the one that takes the most damage. I catch myself on my front two teeth, both with cracks on the side from where my face kissed the floors of roller skating rinks and the frame of my grandparents' bed.
The help me bite my tongue in moments of assurance and bite my lip when I falter under the weight of my own name.
I am not a carnivore, nor someone who wants to take you in, and scrape the meat from your bones.
I'm a woman, with pink gums and a sharp tongue that stabs me in the roof of my mouth and hurts me more than any of the hands that have ever struck my face.
It's not because I'm weak or submissive, I'm callow still, constantly falling in love with every person I touch, not yet cultivated enough to give them the words I once promised.
Winters are always about peeling skin from your mouth and writing poetry.