Poems

Poem One

history books are filled with silence;
ripples of dust, gashes of paper & blood,
line the covers in faux-viscera.
a theatrical act, a prop, covering the only
sole and unbridled truth.
a shelf full of unsung voices, young &
old alike.
the ligneous floor’s creaks are more
akin to shrieks,
yet even those are dimmed out
by a presence unnamed.

no real difference lay between a modern
woman & a buried lady decades ago.
one a skank, one a witch, one a whore.
a denial has never been believed,
if the mouth claiming it is painted.

which is complicit – the book or the
library?

Poem Two

and when the prayer is not enough,
when the “no” grows teeth,
the room remembers.

a girl learns early, that her body
is a scripture that all know.
the splinters of teens fragment
and boil down to their clothes.
the hemline as the confession, in
but only if it’s beautiful.

correction sold in glass bottles
& bright tubes, under the name of
confidence
self-care
empowerment

yet girls learn to hate themselves
before they learn desire, and they stand
before mirrors, hoping not to be beautiful
but forgivable.

Poem Three
the house is a greedy god,
always wanting, watching.
it licks the marrow from a
woman’s wrists, leaves her with
soap-split hands & the smell of
dinner on her fingers.

what arms does she have for herself
when a woman is a borderless nation.
there is nothing sacred in hunger,
nothing noble in being emptied.
every room is an altar built from
unpaid devotion; the sink kneels full of
offerings, laundry bends like penitence
this is no church of love

Poem Four

they call this love because
love is easier to swallow than servitude.
they call this nature
because nature sounds holier than habit.
sounds softer than the old arrangement
dressed in fresh language.

they call it peace, when what they mean is
the absence of her objection
& call it order when
what they mean is her staying still enough
to be overlooked politely, while the language
keeps laundering its own violence; a bruise, a lesson.
barrier into tradition, erasure into etiquette.
making a virtue how gracefully she can be denied,
how elegantly she can vanish.

a woman is not difficult for naming the wound
while it is still carving her skin, she is not cruel
for refusing to call the blade by a gentler name

let them choke on her refusal.

Poem Five

girlhood is more than a wound, etched deep in thighs, wrists, or arms.
it is a hundred bright things braided together,
laughter scattered across bedroom floor, the soft riot, jingle & clash of bracelets,
lip gloss, hushed secrets, & names written in the margins of everything.

it is a miracle of being known before you know yourself.
girl friendship is a language no one teaches properly.
it is a soul that lives in sleepovers, in sharing mirrors, hair ties.
in all its tenderness, something fierce arises like a small army,
full of righteous devotion marching to the rhythm.
this softness will hold worlds, make kingdoms.

girlhood arrives sometimes in the shape of another girl,
sitting cross-legged, eating candy meant to last the week.
the loss of her aches—to be loved by a girl in that way,
is to be held in the tenderest hands conceivable
and still never once dropped.

there is nothing quite like the constellations girls make of each other.
all that orbit, all that bright returning.
one says i am here, and another answers i know
recognition itself is a kind of moonlight.

Poem Six
every lawmaker a prophet,
every pulpit a witness,
every woman reduced to a vessel,
spoken over in rooms she did not enter.

they love us best when we are theoretical—
mother, daughter, saint—something holy enough
to keep from being human.
the body is not a sermon, nor a ballot or public land.
pain is easy to romanticise from behind a podium &
sacrifice sounds noble in someone else’s blood.

choice is sacred until it looks like us.

Poem Seven

nothing is being taken from me, not this moment.
there is no need to prove myself,
or watch out for a red flickering light,
or even to feign alertness.
i do not have to sharpen myself
into something useful, like a dagger.
i sit in it, like sunlight on a wooden floor,
dancing in unrushed waves.

this solitude is not earned. it is not a reward for endurance. it is not porcelain, and i am not something delicate, placed carefully on display.
i am not a doll waiting to be picked up, to be needed, to be given a reason.
still my body remembers the habit of it.

the slight tension in my shoulders, the quiet readiness in my hands, the instinct to listen for a voice that might call my name.
i keep waiting for someone
to need something from me.
a shout for help, a cry for more.
but the room stays still, and i stay too.

Poem Eight

i want like a flame does—
all-devouring, snarling, devout.
i am not warning.
i am the very thing of cruelty.

i want it before language can shape it,
before it can be explained away.
i want it in my mouth,
like cold fruit gone warm too quick,
split open before it is ripe,
juice running on my lips and chest.
i need it in my skin,
but not as something arranged or watched.
this is what it feels like to be inside myself.
i want without apology, without the careful editing of my own hunger.
i need it without translation,
with no one mansplaining it for me.
without the softening of water,
a flame does not ask permission.
it simply burns to burn.

i am only here, in the body of it
in the heat of it, in the staying.
and the wanting is mine, even as it consumes, even as it passes.
it is mine while it is here.

Poem Nine
me & him used to sit close enough
for our knees to knock without thought.
like our bodies were just bodies.
laughter came easy then,
as if it was ripped from my throat,
the last echo of innocence.
somewhere along the years,
the tenderness slowed.

he started noticing where my hands rested.
i started noticing that he noticed.
and suddenly, there was a reflection,
a mirror, where there hadn't been one before.
around others, he sat straighter,
laughed louder, smoothed his hair.
he would turn, already halfway gone,
running towards something noisier,
and easier to cradle in his hands.

i did not change.
I had the same voice, same fingers,
same habit of sitting too close.
but suddenly, i was a girl.
and he— careful.
i had become fragile, or dangerous. something that required distance to remain simple.

a space opened between us,
quiet & unfamiliar,
devoid of all we once knew.
it lurked in the changes, in the way his knee no longer found mine.
he sat a little further away.

Poem Ten
there are ways to exist inside a moment without ever speaking.
she knows them well.

the careful timing of laughter, a second too late,she can feel it then:
the shape of harm as it forms, the way a sentence is all crooked, & the way a room allows it with open arms.

easier to dissolve into the moment than to be the reason it breaks.
easier to let the joke land, even when it cuts, to let the words settle on someone else’s body. she stands adjacent to it, a somber shadow.

she learned it the way you learn the weight of a door, by letting it close behind her, by noticing, that no one thanked her for holding it open.
now she lets it shut.
she has held it shut.
she has smiled when something in her recoiled, let men finish sentences that should have been stopped, has watched laughter carry things further than they deserved to go.

the guilt tucks itself away. in glittering purses, in the back pockets of worn jeans, in the sharp taste behind your teeth.
it lingers in what’s left unsaid, in the space between words spoken and what she allowed to remain.