If you ask me about
being strong,
or resilient,
or brave,
I’ll tell you about unfolding edges
and rebuilding
from a million little pieces
despite the wreck that remains;
and digging the dirt to bedrock
to fracture and shatter,
splinter and break.
I’ll tell you about going downward
and inward, and meeting with sorrow
and speaking to pain;
and when hell spills from your bones,
that you’ll fetch seeds from the
dried-up darkness and grow gardens
from graves.
I poured myself
into the earth;
only the flowers
would know my pain.
And I thought,
I might drown,
I might die
a thousand deaths,
before I would ever
bloom again.
But bloom I did, again and again.
I am extraordinary.
I am a wreck
and a masterpiece,
in equal parts.
I am a warrior,
I will get through
no matter what it takes.
It won’t be easy,
but I am determined
and unstoppable.
I will overcome
and rebuild.
I will bloom from the decay,
and I will thrive.
I will burn, break, and bleed.
I will wear my scars proud,
and I will rise from the ruins—
not unscathed,
but free.
There was something in the way
she dismantled herself—
the way she pulled fire from the sun
and burned;
the way she lay face down
in the rubble, breathing in
ash and despair;
the way she tasted the destruction
before she carved herself anew
from the black sky.
This is an excerpt from a piece I’ve written for my book.
To the night I say:
Obliterate me.
Let this quiet brutality
save me.
I undo myself here,
at the edge of my being;
like a hovering apparition—
a dweller.
I come because the woman
in the wall is whispering again:
The longer you stay
The stronger the cage
I come for the ones
who brought me here—
the ones who came
before me.
I come with little horrors
embedded in my bones.
I come to break chains,
to part ways with
patterns and pain.
I come to sit with the
worn and wise ones, long-lost
but certain there is more.
I come here to shatter,
to free shadows,
to breathe.
Kristin Kory 